Mac OS 10.2.8 installation requires some care. The setupConfig.py checks for os.name == "posix", assuming that all POSIX installations have a C compiler. Since the CC is optional on Mac OS X, this must be commented out for the few Mac OS X users without the C compiler installation.
I set lines 22-28 as follows:
## we only assume the presence of a c compiler on Posix systems, NT people will
# have to enable this manually.
ext_modules=[]
#if os.name == 'posix': # remove for Mac OS X.
# ext_modules=[Extension("Cheetah._namemapper", [os.path.join("src" ,"_namemapper.c")]
-- StevenLott - 27 Dec 2003