Yes, that is exactly what I did. It still took forever to find the right Google keywords to find what I needed, and figure out the right command line invocation

Yes, that is exactly what I did. It still took forever to find the right Google keywords to find what I needed, and figure out the right command line invocations. And I would need to re-learn it all over if I ever upgraded SDL. By comparison, downloading the pre-packaged binaries from LibSDL.org takes all of 10 seconds... You should also look at otool as well while you're at it. They're useful commands, just difficult to discover unless you already know what you're looking for.