Installing Python 2.4 on Linux

[Edward Diener]

John Ridley wrote:
> --- Edward Diener <eldiener_no_spam_here at earthlink.net> wrote:
> [snip]
> 
>>I do not know whether this is a Python problem or a Fedora 3 problem
>>but 
>>I thought I would ask here first and see if anybody else had the same
>>
>>problem. I imagine the problem might exist on other Linux systems.
> 
> 
> On my Mandrake 10.1 system I have the default python 2.3 installation
> plus a separate python 2.4 installation which I compiled from source.
> There are two executables (python2.3 and python2.4) in /usr/bin, plus a
> hard-link (from python2.4) named python. If necessary, I could switch
> back to the default setup by replacing the hard-link with one from
> python2.3 - so the system would then have its preferred python version
> and I could selectively run python2.4 whenever appropriate. So far,
> Mandrake has not complained about using python 2.4 exclusively, so I
> might try removing the old installation eventually. (Then again, it's
> always handy to keep it for compatibility testing).

I need python to be python2.3 else many utilities no longer work. The 
problem is then using IDLE and pydoc for Python2.4 since neither are .py 
scripts and need python to be a link to python2.4 and not python2.3. I 
guess the solution is to write a script a shell script which links 
python to python2.4, run IDLE let's say, then link back to python2.3. 
However while I am doing this, other system facilities which depend on 
python to be python2.3 will be dead.