Well as a workaround I installed libxml2 and libxslt with MacPorts, then downloaded and setup.py installed lxml 2.1.3 for my Python 2.6 version (which is in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework) Here's roughly the steps I undertook...
sudo port install libxml2 @2.7.1_0 sudo port install libxslt @1.1.24_0 curl -o ~/lxml-2.1.3.tgz http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxml-2.1.3.tgz cd tar -xf lxml-2.1.3.tgz cd lxml-2.1.3 sudo python setup.py install --with-xslt-config=/opt/local/bin/xslt-config --with-xlm2-config=/opt/local/bin/xml2-config
then I manually copied the "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/lxml-2.1.3-py2.6-macosx-10.3-i386.egg/lxml" directory into the Inkscape.app bundle generated by <inkscape_sourcedir>/packaging/macosx/osx-app.sh, placing it into the following location: "Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/python/site-packages/i386/2.6"
Of course this hardcoded path is not distribution-friendly. There are ways of working around that:
1. Either change the "Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/bin/inkscape" shell script on line 28 from
export PYTHONPATH="$TOP/python/site-packages/$ARCH/$PYTHON_VERS"
to
export PYTHONPATH="$TOP/python/site-packages
while putting the pre-compiled lxml dir into "Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/python/site-packages/"
or
2. put the pre-compiled lxml dir into "Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/extensions/" where inkex.py will find it directly.
I hope this helps anyone attempting to install from source on OSX...
André