Good question, I can't backtrack right now but it was apmplanner that I had to compile from source, and it contains some python that gets executed during the build process (I haven't seen it try to run it during normal execution yet).

Probably either one of python-serial python-pexpect judging by the file dates, and neither of these are so exciting that there should have been any version conflicts at all.

And the only reason I had to rebuild it at all was due to another version conflict in the apm distribution that expects a particular version of pixbuf to be present on the system and all hell breaks loose if it isn't, and you can't install that version on a modern system because that breaks other packages.

It is insane how bad all this package management crap is. The GNU project and the linux kernel are the only ones that have never given me any trouble.