gcc -o Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Python   -dynamiclib \
		-all_load libpython2.7.a -Wl,-single_module \
		-install_name /tmp/a/empty space/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Python \
		-compatibility_version 2.7 \
		-current_version 2.7;
i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2: space/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Python: No such file or directory

It turns out that supporting a framework path name that contains spaces (or other special characters) is a much more pervasive change that I had originally expected.  That's because the path specified by ./configure --enable-framework= also becomes the default for --prefix which is referenced directly (and indirectly via derived variables) throughout Makefile.pre.in and currently the Makefile does not handle installing a standard Unix-style build on any platform to prefix path that includes spaces, much less a Mac framework build.  That is the following will fail during the install phases:

    ./configure --prefix="/path/with space"
    make && make install

This needs to be addressed first, primarily by quote-protecting all uses of prefix and its derivatives in Makefile shell rules and then the uses of PYTHONFRAMEWORK* variables in the Makefile also need to be protected.  It should be fairly straightforward to find all such uses but there are many of them and changes would affect all platforms that use the Makefile to build and the many variants for each platform (i.e. --enable-shared, --enable-framework, etc) so proper testing would be a major effort.

While I'm sympathetic to supporting arbitrary path names, I'm not sure if it is worth the effort.  I'm going to leave this open for now but I don't plan to work on it myself in the near future.

> While I'm sympathetic to supporting arbitrary path names, I'm not sure
> if it is worth the effort.

My sentiment too.  Supporting non-ASCII characters seems clearly important to me, as it’s a reasonable and common thing to run or install Python from a patch that may contain non-ASCII characters (a first name, “downloads” in French, etc.); supporting spaces is less important.

I don't see supporting spaces as being important, either.  Since the failure is not obviously related to the presence of spaces, I would like to see the limitation documented.

> 
> Éric Araujo <merwok@netwok.org> added the comment:
> 
>> While I'm sympathetic to supporting arbitrary path names, I'm not sure
>> if it is worth the effort.
> 
> My sentiment too.  Supporting non-ASCII characters seems clearly important to me, as it’s a reasonable and common thing to run or install Python from a patch that may contain non-ASCII characters (a first name, “downloads” in French, etc.); supporting spaces is less important.
> 
> ----------
> nosy: +eric.araujo
> 
> _______________________________________
> Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <http://bugs.python.org/issue12956>
> _______________________________________

LMO, if you are still interested in this issue, could you be more specific about where you think this should be documented? If you want to create a patch, go for it.