Question

I’m trying to install Python from source on my Mac. (OS X 10.6.2, Python-2.6.5.tar.bz2) I’ve done this before and it was easy, but for some reason, this time after ./configure, and make, the sudo make install puts things some things in my home directory instead of in /usr/local/… where I expect. The .py files are okay, but not the .so files…

RobsMac Python-2.6.5 $ sudo make install
[…]
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./Lib/anydbm.py /usr/local/lib/python2.6
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./Lib/ast.py /usr/local/lib/python2.6
/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 ./Lib/asynchat.py /usr/local/lib/python2.6
[…]
running build_scripts
running install_lib
creating /Users/rob/Library/Python
creating /Users/rob/Library/Python/2.6
creating /Users/rob/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages
copying build/lib.macosx-10.4-x86_64-2.6/_AE.so -> /Users/rob/Library/
Python/2.6/site-packages
copying build/lib.macosx-10.4-x86_64-2.6/_AH.so -> /Users/rob/Library/
Python/2.6/site-packages
copying build/lib.macosx-10.4-x86_64-2.6/_App.so -> /Users/rob/Library/
Python/2.6/site-packages
[…]

Later, this causes imports that require those .so files to fail. For
example…

RobsMac Python-2.6.5 $ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 28 2010, 13:40:18)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1)] on darwin
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import zlib
Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “”, line 1, in
ImportError: No module named zlib

Any ideas what is wrong?

thanks,
Rob

Answer 1

Doh. I’ve answered my own question. Recently I created a ~/.pydistutils.cfg file, for some stupid reason. I forgot to delete that file. It’s contents were:

[install]
install_lib = ~/Library/Python/$py_version_short/site-packages
install_scripts = ~/bin

make install calls setup.py, and this file was overriding the normal setup.py behavior.

Rob