hi, I'm installing lxml-2.3 on FreeBSD 8.2. Been working on this for a couple of days…
I installed the latest libxml2, libxslt,  Python2.7 in a non-standard location, '/AppDocs/local'
Then installed lxml. All of which went fine as far as I can see.
> python setup.py test
> Building lxml version 2.3.
> Building without Cython.
> Using build configuration of libxslt 1.1.26
> Building against libxml2/libxslt in the following directory: /AppDocs/local/lib
> running test
>
 
But when actually using Python:
> which python
/AppDocs/local/bin/python
 
> python
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Apr  4 2011, 15:25:49)
[GCC 4.2.1 20070719  [FreeBSD]] on freebsd8
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from lxml import etree
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: Shared object "libxml2.so.9" not found, required by "etree.so"
 
The file libxml2.so.9 is in the /AppDocs/local/lib directory. More info:
lxml2-config:
-L/AppDocs/local/lib -lxml2 -lz -lpthread -lm
-I/AppDocs/local/include/libxml2
2.7.8
 
xslt-config
-L/AppDocs/local/lib -lxslt -lxml2 -lz -lpthread -lm
-I/AppDocs/local/include -I/AppDocs/local/include/libxml2
1.1.26
 
ls /AppDocs/local/lib/
libexslt.a     
libexslt.so.8  
libsqlite3.la  
libxml2.a      
libxml2.so.9   
libxslt.la     
pkgconfig      
xsltConf.sh
libexslt.la    
libpython2.7.a 
libsqlite3.so  
libxml2.la     
libxslt-plugins
libxslt.so     
python2.7
libexslt.so    
libsqlite3.a   
libsqlite3.so.8
libxml2.so     
libxslt.a      
libxslt.so.2   
xml2Conf.sh
 
I've been banging my head against this so long I'm probably just getting stupid.
Is there something wrong in the info above?
thanks for any insights,
--Tim Arnold