If you are compiling this package in chroot you must do two things. First, as the root user, ensure that /dev/shm is mounted. If you do not do this, the Python configury will fail with a traceback report referencing /usr/lib/pythonN.N/multiprocessing/synchronize.py. Run: mountpoint /dev/shm >/dev/null || mount -t tmpfs devshm /dev/shm