Was looking for a way to set python3.12 for system or specific project.

found this gist for Ubuntu under WSL2

https://gist.github.com/4sskick/19f071f0b454849b03c31d753527d86a

But I hope last four  lines are universal:

{ cd to cinelerra-gg's source root where autogen.sh is first, I think }

For some reason Fedora 38 does not recognize 3.12 (python --version still says 3.11) so I can not really apply this.
However, Fedora 39 is now available and it has python 3.12 as default.  Since this is an experimental partition, I will attempt this tomorrow when my brain is in better shape.