• Annoyance building python from source

    From Keith Thompson@Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com to comp.lang.python on Mon Dec 29 20:16:17 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.lang.python

    When I build Python from source, the "sudo make install" step
    creates root-owned files in the build directory. I have not seen
    this while building other open-source packages from source.

    Is there a way to avoid this, so no root-owned files are creates
    other than under the target installation directory?

    The details:

    I typically build Python from a cloned git directory. The steps
    (leaving out some irrelevant details) are:

    git clone https://github.com/python/cpython
    cd cpython
    git switch -d VERSION
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install

    The last step creates dozens of *.pyc files under the cpython/Lib
    directory.

    I've recently started doing builds in a temporary subdirectory:

    ...
    mkdir BUILD_DIR
    cd BUILD_DIR
    ../configure
    make
    sudo make install

    That does create a lot of files under BUILD_DIR, but I still get
    a lot of root-owned *.pyc files under the cpython/Lib directory.

    I have to run some command under sudo ("sudo rm ..." or "sudo git clean
    ...") to remove these *.pyc files before doing a new clean build, which
    is a mild annoyance.

    Without having looked into the details, I would have expected these
    *.pyc files to be created by `make`, not by `sudo make install`,
    but perhaps there are good reasons for the way it's done.
    --
    Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
    void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */
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