How to build 64-bit Python on OS X 10.6 — ONLY 64 bit, no Universal nonsense

Question

I just want to build this on my development machine -- the binary install from Python.org is still 32 bits and installing extensions (MySQLdb, for example) is driving me nut

Answer 1

Once you do get 64-bit Python setup using the methods outlined above above, I also found this blog post by Aaron Meurer helpful for verifying that Python is in fact installed as 64-bit. The post also talks about running 64-bit Python alongside a 32-bit installation, which I guess is useful for some purposes.