how to do science with amd64 lenny

[Francesco Pietra <chiendarret@gmail.com>]

Hello:
For computational chemistry on the stable amd64 I needed yesterday
MPICH2. As the deb package is only in testing, I compiled MPICH2 for
stable, but the parallelized program needs python2.6, only available
in testing. I doubt I am able enough to compile python.

I can't move to testing because I am not allowed to do that not only
for the risk of testing distributions for computational work but also
because older key computational package do not run on testing.

Question: would installing python2.6 on lenny from unstable be safe
enough by using apt-pinning? I have no system expert here. I would be
responsible for damage to the software.

Otherwise, do you know a distribution of linux that overcomes such
problems by making some key recent packages available for their stable
version? I could suggest to move to that because of recurring problems
for us.

Thanks
francesco pietra