The python package adds support for the Python programming language. This package provides the object and cached bytecode files needed to enable runtime support for basic Python programs. It also contains the python interpreter and the pydoc documentation tool. The python-devel package contains the libraries and header files needed for developing Python extensions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also ships with numerous python-related packages. By convention, the names of these packages have a python prefix or suffix. Such packages are either library extensions or python bindings to an existing library. For instance, dbus-python is a Python language binding for D-Bus.

Note that both cached bytecode (*.pyc/*.pyo files) and compiled extension modules (*.so files) are incompatible between Python 2.4 (used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5) and Python 2.6 (used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6). As such, you will need to rebuild any extension modules you use that are not part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.