Message 95556 - Python tracker
About the rm -f -r conftest stuff: My guess is that the last person to update configure used Apple's version of autoconf: Apple seems to have silently 'fixed' autoconf version 2.61 to remove some (fairly benign) warnings that appear when running the configure script. Which is fine, but it would be nice if the version string for their autoconf gave some indication that it had been fixed. In any case, rm -f is what comes from standard autoconf 2.61, so I think that's what should be there.