Adrian Portelli wrote:

> There are a few packages like this and Python has been like that for a
> while (maybe not 2.4 but I definitely have seen it when building Python
> myself in the past).  There are also other packages that need to be the
> superuser to build.  I think it would be nice to fix this in some
> 'global' way as I don't believe it is possible to fix all the packages
> that do this on an individual basis.
> 
> We could add something like a NEED_PRIV_CLEAN directive to the Makefile
> and when this is set require that the 'clean' target be done as the
> superuser.  Just a thought.

If this is needed (and it sounds like it might be), how about 
PRIVILEGED_STAGE (modeled after INTERACTIVE_STAGE)? The defaults would
be the same as now, and python24 could go like so:

PRIVILEGED_STAGE+=	clean

- Amitai