how to build and install multiple micro-level major.minor versions of Python

[Brent S. Elmer Ph.D.]

I have built and installed Python on AIX as well as installed a stack of
Python tools.  The version I installed is 2.7.2.  Everything is working
fine but I want to install Python 2.7.6 and the tool stack.  Before I
installed 2.7.2, I installed 2.6.x.  I was able to install the 2.7.2 and
2.6.x side by side because they have different minor numbers.  This
allowed me to be able to thoroughly test 2.7.2 before pointing the link
for python to it.

Now however, I can't see an easy way to install 2.7.6 beside the 2.7.2
since by default, Python installs only to the minor number so if I
install 2.7.6, it will overwrite 2.7.2 since they will both install to
2.7.

I have tried editing the configuration files configure.ac and configure
to set VERSION, PYTHON_VERSION, and PACKAGE_VERSION to 2.7.6.  This
actually seemed to work fine so I ended up with 2.7.6 installed beside
2.7.

However, when I tried to install other python packages using a command
like:

python2.7.6 setup.py install

the python2.7.6 binary was used for the install but the setup wrote the
package library to .../lib/python2.7 not .../lib/python2.7.6.

I thought maybe it had something to do with bin/python-config pointing
to bin/python-config2.7, so I pointed python-config to
python-config2.7.6 but that didn't help.


Is there a way to do what I want to do (i.e. install 2.7.6 beside 2.7)?