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Another way this issue can show up: when building Python itself. If Parser/Python.asdl needs to be built (as with a new source checkout), the makefile target executes a python script (Parser/asdl_c.py) via /usr/bin/env python (a bootstrap dependency). If that python happens to be python2.7 and the build MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET target is not the same as that as that of the python2.7, the python2.7 fails with the $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET mismatch from sysconfig.py _init_posix and thus the build fails.
The patch looks good to me except that all of the "assertEquals" (now deprecated) should be changed to "assertEqual". I think parts 1 and 2 should definitely be applied to py3k, 3.2, and 2.7. I'm less certain about the distutils changes (parts 3 and 4) but I agree they are probably the right thing to do. Then there's the issue of getting corresponding changes into distutils2 if needed.