To build the release tarball, you need to add "--without-tests" to the configure flags, similar to what #25308 does [here](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/25308/files#diff-01175d1046cfed8de962558193d94a47R28) (but I think don't `<<` that array in the line below). I have just finished building a formula based on that, and that works pretty well on a clean OS X install. (-: