I have a Mac and am motivated to help eradicating this thing (since it just wasted a bunch of my time already), but I'm rusty on how to test this thoroughly. Should I just configure --with-framework (or however it's spelled)? What tools would depend on this env var existing?

I also am unsure about how to test, and it sounds like from Ronald says in the ticket that the approach presented here is misguided, although maybe only in the fact that it breaks OS X 10.6, which is 9 years old. So it may be that it's not possible to test without a very old mac.