cpython/Misc/RPM

This directory contains support file used to build RPM releases of
Python.  Its contents are maintained by Sean Reifschneider
<jafo@tummy.com>.

If you wish to build RPMs from the base Python release tar-file, note
that you will have to download the
"doc/<version>/html-<version>.tar.bz2"
file from python.org and place it into your "SOURCES" directory for
the build to complete.  This is the same directory that you place the
Python-2.3.1 release tar-file in.  You can then use the ".spec" file in
this directory to build RPMs.

You may also wish to pursue RPMs provided by distribution makers to see if
they have one suitable for your uses.  If, for example, you just want a
slightly newer version of Python than what the distro provides, you could
pick up the closest SRPM your distro provides, and then modify it to
the newer version, and build that.  It may be as simple as just changing
the "version" information in the spec file (or it may require fixing
patches).

NOTE: I am *NOT* recommending just using the binary RPM, and never do an
install with "--force" or "--nodeps".

Also worth pursuing may be newer versions provided by similar distros.  For
example, a Python 3 SRPM from Fedora may be a good baseline to try building
on CentOS.

Many newer SRPMs won't install on older distros because of format changes.
You can manually extract these SRPMS with:

   mkdir foo
   cd foo
   rpm2cpio <../python3-*.src.rpm | cpio -ivd