Dunno whether this is worth the effort or not, but ...

The attached patch against HEAD adopts AM_PATCH_PYTHON variable naming
(at least mostly) described here
     http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/automake/Python.html
without using AM_PATH_PYTHON itself.

The two flaws I see off-hand are
     pythondir does not have "${prefix}/..." but rather a hardwired path
     PYTHON_PLATFORM isn't set *shrug*

I'll let Ralf decide whether worth the effort, and Anders decide
when the compile test against Mac OS X framework should/could be  
replaced
by AM_PATH_PYTHON instead.

73 de Jeff