No -- I simply did ./configure, make, make install, as mentioned in the MacOS readme of the SDL source. Also the FPC wiki says that you don't need to use the Framework, you CAN use the Unix way.

The generated libraries were stored in the right place, with the right names, but the linker complained that they were built for a wrong platform (although I explicitly told the configure script to build for i386 Intel Macs, not for PowerPC Macs).