Charlie noted:
I don't know of anyone who has successfully compiled against Apple's
freetype that is part of the X11SDK. I suggest that /usr/X11R6 be
removed from the darwin list in setup.py.
Thanks for the quick feedback; I suspected as much. Can anyone
suggest a way to use freetype to build matplotlib so that the
freetype doesn't affect all the other stuff that likes to
see Apple's X11 freetype? E.g., perhaps I should install
freetype into some location not on the usual search paths, and
direct matplotlib to look in that place. Is there a way to
do this that doesn't require manually hacking matplotlib
every time I download a new version? Surely I'm not the only
person using both matplotlib and GTK stuff....
-Tom