[Pythonmac-SIG] Arggh! How to resolve link problems in OS X

[Kenneth McDonald]

Over that last week, I've run into a couple of occasions wherein
a distutils install attempts to compile some C files against Tk, and
fails. Using my very limited amount of link knowledge, it seems
that they are not finding the Tk headers and libraries due to the
fact that these reside in a Frameworks structure, rather than in
the traditional UNIX file structure. Things may also be complicated
by the fact that I suspect I have elements of Tk/X11 lying around
as well as the AquaTclTk I am actually using with Python.

My question is; what is the best way to set things up so that
python compilations looking for these (or other) sources
actually find them? I could probably just go in and hack away until
I got things working this time, but that could get rather messy,
and I would no doubt have to repeat it in the future. Do any
of the pythonistas out there have favored solutions? Modify path
settings? Create links in standard UNIX locations? Modify/update
disutils? My preference is for as general a solution as possible,
so if yours goes beyond addressing just Python/Tk link/compile
problems, that's cool.

Thanks,
Ken