I recommending building Python from source if you're a developer, mostly in order to be sure you have debugging symbols enabled. This is really no different on Debian than anywhere else.
Just grab the Python source and untar.
The Python that comes with Debian hogs both /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib, so I used /opt instead. I like to leave the Debian installation alone, also, so I can test packaged builds as well as my development set-up.
./configure --prefix=$HOME --enable-unicode=ucs4 make make install
Note: you'll want to be sure you have the package libreadline4-dev before building this, or you'll end up with a very unfriendly interactive Python interpreter.
Then you want to be sure that while developing, you select this python before the others.
I do this with a development shell script:
export PATH=$HOME/lib/python2.2/site-packages/Ft/Share/Bin:$HOME/bin:$PATH alias 4ssm='4ss_manager'
Then I set up for using PostgreSQL:
As root:
su - postgres createuser [username]
Then I downloaded PygreSQL and installed it to the local Python copy. Remember that the deb does you no good because it goes to the main Python library.
Then hack its setup.py to have
include_dirs=['/usr/include/postgresql/', '/usr/include/postgresql/server/'] library_dirs=[]
and then ./setup.py install
Then I did a setup.py install for 4Suite from CVS and (after changing the directory)
4ss_manager init --noprompt
To set up.