Ronald Oussoren wrote:
> 
> Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren@mac.com> added the comment:
> 
> I don't agree that there must be an option to fall back to system provided libs. The point of using an SDK is to avoid doing that because you might end up with a binary that won't work on an earlier version of the OS (the OpenSSL one is an example of that).

If you don't and the SDK doesn't include the files Python is looking
for, then the build will fail, so I don't see an improvement in not
doing so ;-)

Also note that a user may not have a require to be able to use the
built Python on some previous version of the OS.

Note that if you use MacPorts it's fairly common to use e.g.
use their Tcl version for Python which resides in /Library
as well.

The SDK logic should not redirect such paths to the SDK were they
don't exist.

> I agree that the documentation/comments should be extended to not that additional work would be needed when we start looking for files that aren't headers or libraries.
> 
> BTW. I still don't quite understand why the build did fail for you in the first place. Is your source tree in /usr/local as well?

Yes, we build and install from /usr/local/src - as is standard for
Unix platforms. I know that Mac OS X is different in some way, but
at least the Mac ports collection uses the same approach.