With users not relying on a particular version of Python coming with the system installation, we have the freedom to take advantage of new language features, performance improvements, and all the other goodness a developer gets when tracking near the upstream version.

To be honest, the system maintainers also get some advantages of not being locked to an aging version of Python for our system tools. For more info, see Introducing Application Streams in RHEL 8. Now, users can choose what version of Python they want to run in any given userspace and it simply works.

Through Application Streams, in combination with Python’s ability to be parallel installed, we can now make multiple versions of Python available and easily installable, from the standard repositories, into the standard locations. To improve the experience for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 users, we have moved the Python used by the system “off to the side” and introduced the concept of Application Streams based on Modularity. Although this can be true for a lot of tools (Ruby, Node, Perl, PHP), the Python use case is more complicated because so many Linux tools (like yum) rely on Python. Or, if you want to see what packages we recommend, use yum install yum install Read on for why.įor prior versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and most Linux distributions, users have been locked to the system version of Python unless they got away from the system’s package manager. Give yum install python3 and/or yum install python2 a try. TL DR Of course we have Python! You just need to specify whether you want Python 3 or 2 as we didn’t want to set a default.

Yum python