Patrick Useldinger wrote: > http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2006/12/22/how-to-build-safe-clean-python-25-rpms-for-fedora-core-6/
I've read that. It's very funny. "Now you’ll need to go into the SOURCES directory and frob a single file..." It does have something very useful in it - Python's 2.5's dependency list: sudo yum install autoconf bzip2-devel db4-devel \ expat-devel findutils gcc-c++ gdbm-devel glibc-devel gmp-devel \ libGL-devel libX11-devel libtermcap-devel ncurses-devel \ openssl-devel pkgconfig readline-devel sqlite-devel tar \ tix-devel tk-devel zlib-devel If a Python build needs all that, something in ./configure should be checking for each of those. After all, that's what ./configure is supposed to be for. It looks like a Python install will plow ahead without ncurses-devel, and install a dud version. (Why is "make install" doing compiles, anyway? It should just be copying. "make" is supposed to do all the compiles.) This, though, illustrates exactly what I was talking about - there is no off the shelf way to install Python 2.5 on Fedora Core 6. Others have worked through this and documented their pain and how to do it manually, but that's not the same as fixing the packaging problem. Debian tries to deal with this problem. See http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/index.html But Fedora Core does not. Perl, PHP, C, C++, and Java don't have this particular problem. Python stands alone, out in the cold. John Nagle -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list