python easy_install fails with "assembler for architecture ppc not installed" on Mac OS X

bash-3.2$ sudo easy_install appscript开发者_开发知识库  
Password:  
Searching for appscript  
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/appscript/  
Reading http://appscript.sourceforge.net  
Best match: appscript 1.0.0  
Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/a/appscript/appscript-1.0.0.tar.gz#md5=6619b637037ea0f391f45870c13ae38a  
Processing appscript-1.0.0.tar.gz  
Running appscript-1.0.0/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-C4d1az/appscript-1.0.0/egg-dist-tmp-yVTHww  
/usr/libexec/gcc/powerpc-apple-darwin10/4.2.1/as: assembler (/usr/bin/../libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/as or /usr/bin/../local/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/as) for architecture ppc not installed  
Installed assemblers are:  
/usr/bin/../libexec/gcc/darwin/x86_64/as for architecture x86_64  
/usr/bin/../libexec/gcc/darwin/i386/as for architecture i386  

I'm a pretty big noob at this stuff (I've learned to use python and unix a bit, but I've never had to deal with installation.) Earlier I was getting an error related to gcc-4.2 not being found, and I found some posts that recommended reinstalling XCode. I went with 4.0 (bad choice?) and now I get this. I've got no idea what to do at this point.

This happened for me after having upgraded to XCode 4; I haven't had time to figure out what went wrong during the upgrade (or whether this is the intended behaviour), but the following workaround works for me:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" easy_install whatever

The ARCHFLAGS trick works with setup.py as well:

env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" python setup.py install

I found another solution here which solves the problem once and for all. It turns out XCode4 still has the ppc assembler. You just need a symlink to it in the right place:

$ sudo ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc /Developer/usr/libexec/gcc/darwin
$ sudo ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc /usr/libexec/gcc/darwin

Fixed the problem for me with XCode4 installed on Snow Leopard.

EDIT: I tried other solutions, which worked in some cases, but invariably encountered a package that hardcoded the PPC requirement somewhere. Providing the PPC assembler got rid of all these problems once and for all.

For me, the key was the ppc assembler, not the ARCHFLAGS stuff. But, the suggestion above didn't work; I didn't have the files in those locations. But with some tinkering and poking around, I found that I did have the ppc assember at /usr/bin/as. I first tried sudo ln -s /usr/bin/as /usr/libexec/as/ppc/as, but that failed (something about could not fork process...??). So I ended up just doing sudo cp /usr/bin/as /usr/libexec/as/ppc/as, and that worked (I think I had to do some sudo mkdirs along that path, as well).

Using the system Pythons on Mac OS X 10.6, you'll need to have the gcc-4.2 from the Apple Xcode Developer Tools installed to build extension modules, like with Appscript. Other products may need the Xcode gcc-4.0 so you should install them both. They co-exist just fine.