Segmentation faults with sphinx and pyenv

I’m a big fan of the pyenv project because it makes installing multiple python versions a simple process. However, I kept stumbling into a segmentation fault whenever I tried to build documentation with sphinx in Python 2.7.11:

writing output... [100%] unreleased
[app] emitting event: 'doctree-resolved'(<document: <section "current series release notes"...>>, u'unreleased')
[app] emitting event: 'html-page-context'(u'unreleased', 'page.html', {'file_suffix': '.html', 'has_source': True, 'show_sphinx': True, 'last

generating indices... genindex[app] emitting event: 'html-page-context'('genindex', 'genindex.html', {'pathto': <function pathto at 0x7f4279d51230>, 'file_suffix': '.html'
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I tried a few different versions of sphinx, but the segmentation fault persisted. I did a quick reinstallation of Python 2.7.11 in the hopes that a system update of gcc/glibc was causing the problem:

pyenv install 2.7.11

The same segmentation fault showed up again. After a ton of Google searching, I found that the --enable-shared option allows pyenv to use shared Python libraries at compile time:

env PYTHON_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--enable-shared CC=clang" pyenv install -vk 2.7.11

That worked! I’m now able to run sphinx without segmentation faults.