Portable linux python install

[Mike M]

Hello,

I've been digging around the list archives and I haven't found a good
answer to this, so I was hoping someone on this list could help me
out.  Here's my conundrum:

I have a python application which I'd like to distribute to thousands
of machines in our server farm.  The good news is, all of the machines
I'd like to run this application on are running Red Hat Linux.  The
bad news is, they are various versions of RHEL - some Red Hat 7.3 and
RHEL 2.1, a lot more RHEL 3, even more RHEL 4 and some RHEL 5 to boot.
 Because of this variation of base installs of Python (1.5 up to 2.4
and everywhere in-between), I was wondering if there was a way to
compile a common python 2.5 that I could then drop into the /opt
directory and run from there, leaving the system python in place.  I
understand there may be some glibc compatibility issues, but hopefully
that is as simple as installing the appropriate compat-* libraries.

Is this possible?  If so, what are the steps to do it?  Has anyone
ever tried to do something similar?

I apologize if this is a ridiculously simple question, but things like
this always throw me for a loop.

Thanks in advance for any assistance or pointers.

Mike