Compiling/Installing Python 2.7 on OSX 10.6

[Ned Deily]

In article 
<238cec6d-2f47-4c97-8941-e28e6808946c at a9g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,
 Jeremy <jlconlin at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> I downloaded the source from python.org and extracted with 'tar -xzvf
> Python-2.7.tgz'  My home space is on some network somewhere.  I think
> the network filesystem creates the ._ at the beginning of the files.
> It's really quite annoying.

It is and really shouldn't be happening.  If I understand correctly, 
whoever administers your system is doing its users a disservice by 
putting OS X home directories on such a file system.

> > The path names look a little suspicious, too:
> > /home/jlconlin.  What file system type are these files on?  You
> > shouldn't run into problems if you use an HFS+ file system (for
> > instance) and extract the tarball from the command line using
> > /usr/bin/tar.
> 
> I am intentionally installing in my home directory (i.e., /home/
> jlconlin) because I don't have access to /usr/local.  Supposedly this
> is possible, and in fact common.

It is common and not normally a problem.  I was just noting that the 
path name was not the OS X default of /Users/jlconlin.

That said, there are a couple of options.  Either find another file 
system to install to or, after extracting, you may be able to delete the 
spurious '._' files by a judicious use of find (-name '\.\_*' perhaps), 
or you could probably just ignore all the "compiling" errors.  Those 
aren't "compile" errors in the sense of C compiler errors; rather they 
are from one of the final install steps that produces optimized .pyc and 
.pyo versions of all of the standard library .py files.  The ._ files 
aren't python files but they do end in .py so compileall mistakenly 
tries to bytecompile them, too.

> Is it safe to ignore these modules then?

Yes.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org