Comment by raymondh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raymondh | Hacker News Reader

It seems like everyone is converging on 2.7. The commercial distributions from ActiveState and Enthought are at 2.7. Apple's OS/X Lion ships 2.7. The major linux distros are there. PyPy is at 2.7. Jython and IronPython are mostly 2.7 capable. And my understanding is the Google's AppEngine will be at 2.7 soon enough.

This is the Long Term Support version of Python, the one that is currently getting bug fixes and will continue to get bug fixes long into the future.

AFAICT, there are very few reasons to be using an older version of Python. By now, most of major third-party modules are working with 2.7 so there shouldn't be much holding you back.

> so there shouldn't be much holding you back.

Four words: Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7/Python-2.7.tgz
  tar xvfz Python-2.7.tgz
  cd Python-2.7
  ./configure
  make
  su
  make altinstall

Note: use "make altinstall" to avoid damaging the system python.

If you have make or a compiler installed on a RHEL system (other than your organizational build machine), you're Doing It Wrong.

I install from source to /opt. It's fast and it works. What's the downside of this?

I suspect sneak is implying that you should build packages on a build box, then your other servers can just grab those instead of compiling themselves. It's a good idea.

If you assume you have the right/knowledge to tell ME how to use MY RHEL, you assume wrong.

And Ubuntu LTS.

Yep, unfortunately, which is why the follow-up post (http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/10/10/installing-python-2-...) came. Had Ubuntu 10.04 given me Python 2.7 with the usual `apt-get install`, there would be no need to install it from source.

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