What I am trying to achieve is when a django projects starts, have it run compilemessages automatically in a cross-platform way. That way the mo files don't need to be checked into source control, and when translations are added in branches and then merged back conflicts don't occur.
I'm having trouble with this because from what I gather, compilemessages depends on settings.py, so if you try to run it from settings.py it detects the circular reference and then doesn't run.