> Running configure on a MacOSX system will set
> MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET to 10.4, which is probably not optimal
> for anyone on a recentish system.

What's more, when I first tried to compile Python on Mac OS X, and I have MacPorts' version of Python as the default interpreter in the terminal, I get the following errors when trying to do bare `./configure; make`:

bash-3.2$ make 
./Parser/asdl_c.py -h ./Include ./Parser/Python.asdl
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 553, in <module>
    main()
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 535, in main
    known_paths = addusersitepackages(known_paths)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 268, in addusersitepackages
    user_site = getusersitepackages()
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 243, in getusersitepackages
    user_base = getuserbase() # this will also set USER_BASE
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 233, in getuserbase
    USER_BASE = get_config_var('userbase')
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/sysconfig.py", line 535, in get_config_var
    return get_config_vars().get(name)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/sysconfig.py", line 434, in get_config_vars
    _init_posix(_CONFIG_VARS)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/sysconfig.py", line 313, in _init_posix
    raise IOError(msg)
IOError: $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET mismatch: now "10.4" but "10.6" during configure
make: *** [Include/Python-ast.h] Error 1


I worked around this by adding MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 to the configure script, but I have to remember to do that every time I configured a fresh clone of the source.