MySQLdb install vs. "setuptools"

[David Cournapeau]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 7:16 AM, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> wrote:

>    It's nice that some of the options work.  Note that someone who
> used "--bindir", expecting it to work, might end up overwriting their
> existing Python installation unintentionally, which would break system
> administration tools like cPanel and "yum".
>
>    cPanel support recommends against installing a new Python other
> than through "yum".
>
> http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/mailman-breaks-stable-upcp-due-python-upgrade-126453.html
> http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/upgrade-python-whm-113593.html
>
>    They don't trust other install mechanisms.  With good cause.

This has absolutely nothing to do with how python is installed. It is
common sense that you should upgrade an installed package through the
package manager mechanism (here yum), and is true for any software,
python or not.

> The latest production versions of Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux and CentOS, the major server distributions, still ship
> with Python 2.4.3, a five year old version of Python.

Yes, by definition RHEL ships softwares that does not change for a
long time. By your argument, the linux kernel and gcc are broken
because they are 4 years old on RHEL 5 (linux 2.6.18. gcc 4.0.*). That
does not make any sense.

cheers,

David