Thanks for your thoughtful replies. I don't use altinstall because using --prefix is sufficient to get a locally built Python.
Both your suggestions require root (or sudo) and changing the system itself. Whereas I was hoping to just build a local Python and install my own Tcl/Tk in its lib and site-packages (which I believe is what happens on Windows?). Anyway, maybe that isn't possible. I will try installing my patched Tcl/Tk system wide on an old machine and if that works I'll do it to my main machine and rebuild my Pythons to use it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
