Installing Twisted through pip broken on one server

I run into this issue when I tried install requirements on python 2.7.16. I've chosen to install package directly from zip archive Twisted releases
pip install https://github.com/twisted/twisted/archive/twisted-18.7.0.zip - it works for me

Ok after struggling with this for several hours, I figured out the problem.

Running pip install --verbose twisted helped with the diagnosis.

The error message is misleading. The problem is that I built a custom installation of Python 2.7.10 without having previously installed libbz2-dev. So the steps to fix this were:

1. sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev
2. cd /<untarred python source dir>
3. ./configure --prefix=<my install path> --enable-ipv6
4. make
5. make install

With this done, I can now create virtual environments and pip install Twisted.