Hi David,
I have to say I'm a bit sceptic about adding more runtimes to one
distribution [1]. This will increase the maintenance burden and the
general packaging complexity with no real benefit to me.
Personally I (as a developer) find it easy enough to support Python
2.4-2.6 in one software (and Python 2.3 is usually doable if really
necessary). Therefore I don't feel the need to use a more recent version
of Python e.g. for RHEL5.
To me the point of a distribution is to provide a selected set of
software which works well together. If we ship other stacks, IMHO the
point should be to just ship the interpreter, maybe setuptools but not
all the modules. Speaking as a Python developer, the biggest pain is to
compile Python itself. All the other stuff I can do with virtualenv.
So the question to me is: Is all the infrastructure work worth it? To me
the answer is no but on on the other hand I'm just a single, not very
active packager.
fs
[1] I see Python 2/3 as different languages that live side-by-side which
is why I welcome the additional Python 3 stack wholeheartedly.