Today I tried to install texlive on Snow Leopard via Macports, in order to make use of pdflatex with pandoc. However I received this error:

Python interpreter is too old

This would exit Macports with an error, suggesting that a bug should be raised. It appeared to be looking for Python 2.6 specifically, which is an old version. I tried “port clean all”, which ran successfully but made no difference. I also tried “port update outdated”, which tripped up on the same problem.

In the end, the solution appeared to be related to permissions. Running this seemed to fix it for me:

sudo chmod ug+x /opt/local/bin/python2.6

Hopefully that’ll save someone a couple of hours of Macports tinkering.