+1 for you sir, we are constantly fighting with Unix admins who refuse to install anything but the generic terribly old 2.3 - 2.4 Python versions that are bundled with their default enterprise Suse packages, which only leads to full /home issues since everyone just downloads their own versions, compiling extensions manually.
Or you could write the applications for the systems they will run on. Why develop in the latest Ubuntu with Python 2.7 when you know your company runs RHEL 5 or SUSE with Python 2.4?
I know it was annoying how long RHEL lasted with Python 2.4, but now the latest RHEL, Debian-stable, and Ubuntu LTS all have Python 2.6, so write to Python 2.6 if your company uses those OSs, there's not excuse to write incompatible code targeted at Python 2.7.
In many Linux distributions it is impossible to replace the Python version, core parts of the OS like package management will break. It is possible to install another version in parallel and use "virtualenv --python=" to use it for an application. If you are using RHEL/CentOS 5 you can install the python26 package from the EPEL repository.
