Numeric Python Installation woes

[Fernando Pérez]

>
> Maybe you should re-install it (python 22) and get rid of the two old
installations.

Careful. The OP hasn't specified but from the symptoms I suspect he's a
victim of RedHat's completely ass-backwards python setup as of 7.2. He'll
majorly blow his system if he removes 1.5.

His best bet is to manually build 2.2, shove it into /usr/local/, and make
sure that gets found by his user's /usr/bin/env before 1.5. But NOT by root
and other system-level users (like those of certain daemons), those need to
see 1.5. He'll just have to play a few path games.

And complain to redhat for the mess they've made. Every other week there's
someone here totally (and justly) confused by their setup. I have yet to
hear a convincing argument from them justifying what they did. They could
perfectly have made it so that _their_ scripts find 1.5 first if they need
it, while allowing the user system default to be 2.x. But no, instead they
chose to make it difficult for users who aren't too savvy with internals to
safely switch to 2.x (if you simply change the global python link to point
to 2.x, you break lots of stuff).

Cheers,

f.