> Jack, could you please comment on why the LDFLAGS are added to 
LDSHARED
> by configure, rather than using LDFLAGS as extra argument to LDSHARED 
?

Because this worked, no deep reason. The initial framework builds were a 
big hack, because they were neither static nor shared builds (because 
the extensions were linked against the framework), so I had to find 
something that worked while hoping I wouldn't break too much on other 
platforms.

In case anyone is interested in my opinion: I would scratch the whole 
configure/make suite and rebuild it from scratch. As others here have 
noticed, the OPT/EXTRA_CFLAGS pattern that Python adhered to has lost 
out the the CFLAGS/LDFLAGS pattern, and more such things. And this is 
important if people want to do recursive builds.

But: it's a major undertaking to get this working, especially if you 
don't want to pull in libtool:-(