[Discuss] "Software Collections" for installing multiple (newer) environments on RHEL

[greg at freephile.com (Greg Rundlett (freephile))]

I've been growing my Python chops lately, and discovered this new
development which I thought share-worthy.

If you've ever spent any time with RHEL 6.x, you know how some important
packages are pretty old (e.g. Python 2.6 instead of 2.7 or even 3.x).
 Installing multiple versions of Python is possible, and there are a bunch
of ways to do it - so it's often confusing.  Virtualenv is the 'best' way
to be able to run multiple distinct Python environments on a single host
since it also gives you the ability to load specific dependencies into each
environment.  While that's great, there is also a new option specifically
for RedHat called Software Collections that works kinda the same way as
Virtualenv (environment shim) and allows you to install collections of
packages for Python as well as other systems like Postgres, Nodejs, MariaDB
etc.

With Software Collections, you can build and concurrently install multiple
versions of the same software components on your system. Software
Collections have no impact on the system versions of the packages installed
by any of the conventional RPM package management utilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lcK8L3XDek Ryan White (RedHat) at PyCon
2014
Guide:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora_Contributor_Documentation/1/html-single/Software_Collections_Guide/index.html




Greg Rundlett
http://eQuality-Tech.com
http://freephile.org