>>> It's not hard to build RPMs of newer and/or supported versions of Python. It's actually the hardest thing to do and to maintain long term. I'd say from exp

>>> It's not hard to build RPMs of newer and/or supported versions of Python. It's actually the hardest thing to do and to maintain long term. I'd say from experience that building your own is the #1 thing that was plaguing legacy systems in the bank and preventing to maintain them. Developers built perl/python/whatever manually and distributed (RPM or whatever). It's de facto unmaintainable because it cannot be built again. Sure thing is, there were special build flags set and some extra libraries/plugins embedded into the build, but who knows? There is never any instruction left. Even if there was, these are complex software with huge web of dependencies, it's probably impossible to get everything to run/build 5-10 years later. (DLL hell is a major recurrent issue on Linux when upgrading the distro and some old libraries are gone due to googlecode/sourceforge dying). Hence the solution to ensure that simple critical scripts work and can be maintained in the far future when required, is to rely on the /usr/bin/python from RHEL (and store everything in source control). Don't build your own interpreter.