I think it may even be true that distribution maintainers should look at installing the scripting languages their OS requires in different privileged places and

I think it may even be true that distribution maintainers should look at installing the scripting languages their OS requires in different privileged places and version-locking their system scripts, as upgrading Python from 2.4 to 2.7 can break some system scripts, yet useful tools like Mercurial don't like very old versions of Python.