On OS X, I wanted to build my own copy of Python that used my own copy
of Tkinter (built for X11). 

To do this, I passed "LDFLAGS=-rpath,/path/to/lib" to configure so that
Python could find my specific lib files, but I also had to edit Python's
setup.py so that detect_tkinter() would not do anything special for Darwin:

$ diff setup.py original_setup.py 
1199c1199
<         if 0 and (platform == 'darwin' and
---
>         if (platform == 'darwin' and


I did this based on a post by Ronald Oussoren to the Python-SIG Mac
mailing list [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/14008].
He also suggested that I file a bug report, asking for an argument to be
added to python's configure script to avoid having to edit setup.py.

Thanks