Fix for no module named _sysconfigdata while compiling

[Raymond Cote]

Thought I might help someone else address a problem I ran into this afternoon.
While compiling Python 2.7.9 on CentOS 6, I received the error: no module named _sysconfigdata

Googling found a number of other people having this problem — but the other issues were all after the Python was installed — not while building. In digging through their advice, I saw a number of them spoke about having multiple versions of Python installed. In my case, I already had a custom Python 2.7.3 installed on this machine — and I was upgrading over it to Python 2.7.9.

I found that renaming my custom /opt/python2.7 directory and then building the new release in the same directory, that the problem went away.

Summary:

Compiling Python 2.7.9 resulted in error: no module named _sysconfigdata while compiling.
My configuration: ./configure --prefix=/opt/python2.7 --enable-unicode=ucs4 --enable-shared LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath /opt/python2.7/lib"

make;make alt install

Remove the existing /opt/python2.7 directory which had Python 2.7.3.
Now all builds and installs properly.
—Ray