An RPM spec file build and alt-install Python 2.7 on RHEL.
To Build:
sudo yum -y install rpmdevtools && rpmdev-setuptree
sudo yum -y install tk-devel tcl-devel expat-devel db4-devel gdbm-devel sqlite-devel bzip2-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel readline-devel
wget https://raw.github.com/nmilford/rpm-python27/master/python27.spec -O ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/python27.spec
wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.5/Python-2.7.5.tar.bz2 -O ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/Python-2.7.5.tar.bz2
QA_RPATHS=$[ 0x0001|0x0010 ] rpmbuild -bb ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/python27.spec