This is still applies for trunk.

I've added the following lines to Makefile (in the top level directory).

SELF=$(SELFA)
SELFA=$(SELF)

Running make then hangs.
I'm attaching a patch, which fixes this issue (against trunk). Running
make now prints:

~/python-trunk/ make                                             
ralf@rat64 ok
sysconfig.py: warning: could not resolve names from makefile (recursive
definition?): {'SELFA': '$(SELF)', 'SELF': '$(SELFA)'}
running build
running build_ext
INFO: Can't locate Tcl/Tk libs and/or headers

Failed to find the necessary bits to build these modules:
_bsddb            _tkinter          bsddb185       
dbm               dl                gdbm           
imageop           sunaudiodev                      
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the
module's name.

running build_scripts