Yes the point is to test compilation of the path.  If I run python3 -m compilelall on my installed python, it works fine (zero return code).  I can't really investigate this further right now, but it isn't obvious to me what the answer is from the information in the issue so far, except that it doesn't *look* like it should be necessary to skip the tests unless the installation directories are read only *and* the .pyc files in them are non-existent or out of date.