After hints here and there from different channels, and a pretty good StackOverflow post on the subject, I've concluded that "out of the box", the install from source utilities don't really provide many hooks for making a "custom/minimal" install. Best bet is basically to do the standard install, and then go trim off the fat that wasn't called for. If not that, you really have to take ownership of the whole build process (e.g. as Debian and others do). Thanks to Ned and others for helping along the way.
One part of the recommended install is to 'make test'. In a perfect world, I guess everything would pass. Since I'm running an embedded linux, on an arm processor, I kind of expect some issues. As the tests run, I see that there are indeed some errors here and there. But I don't see where they get summarized or anything. I guess I can try to capture the output and grep through it. I'm curious how people use the make install. Looking to bootstrap off of other's experience, if any has some willing to share. <aside>I find this is a tricky topic to get help with. Most of the python mailing list and irc channel is really about _python_ questions. Not the meta aspect of building it. And the python-dev guys make it pretty clear (in a nice way) that python-dev is for developing the next version of python (3.4 at the moment). They're probably the ones that really know these answers more than the lay python developer though. It's too bad there's not a forum "in between" to share/ask for help with these kinds of things.</aside> --Travis Griggs "I multiply all estimates by pi to account for running around in circles" -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
