Linux Mint installation of Python 3.5

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 12:37 PM, Mario Figueiredo <marfig at gmx.com> wrote:
> Under Linux Mint it is not a good idea to just go ahead and replace the
> system installed Python versions and their packages. And yet I wish to
> both update the 3.4 modules and install Python 3.5. I understand that
> for the first I just need to use virtualenv.
>
> But how can I safely install Python 3.5 from sources into a Linux Mint
> box without damaging the OS?

The easiest way to install something from source is to use 'make
altinstall' for the final step. That should install you a 'python3.5'
binary without touching the 'python3' binary. That said, though, it's
entirely possible that upgrading 'python3' from 3.4 to 3.5 won't
actually break anything; it won't break any script that explicitly
looks for python3.4, and there's not a huge amount of breakage. But to
be on the safe side, use altinstall and explicitly ask for python3.5
any time you want it.

Personally, I use the regular 'make install', but that's because I'm
on Debian - the system Python is 2.7.

ChrisA