Linking extensions to libpython with a static build of python will cause problems (as you described in your initial message).

The not very satisfactory response is "don't do that then".  Note that distutils won't link against libpython by default.

Longer term I want to look into "-bundle_loader ..." because that might allow us to drop "-undefined dynamic_lookup" from the linker flags and hence give a nicer development experience (build-time error instead of runtime error when symbols cannot be found).