Install multiple version of python on ubuntu

I have a requirement to use a special version of python other than the default on my machine. I am uisng ubuntu 9.10. By default, python 2.6.4 is installed. And a lot other packages depends on it. So it is impossible to remove it. And I need to install from source code since I need to use --enable-shared to do configure before running make.

 

After some googling, I find that make altinsall can be used to install multiple versions of python. But it can only handle the situation where the minior versions are different for each. For example, install python 2.6 and python 3.0 together. But not for python 2.6.4 and python 2.6.2. For this kind of situation, --prefix option can be used for configure.