[intpx]

Bingo. This falls under the scope of support for an enterprise linux company-- orgs pay them to keep stuff backwards compatible long after the upstream deprecates it. Apple is decidedly not an enterprise support organization. RHEL also doesn't want you using system python as your dev python. RHEL 8 uses 'platform-python' for the bits the system needs and if you install 3.6, they share the common bits If your using a mac as a dev box, and really need python 2.7, you still have options.