Trying to build 3.1a1 on Fedora 9, the following extensions get skipped
even though the requisite packages are installed

_dbm               
_gdbm              
_hashlib        
_sqlite3           
_ssl               
bz2             
readline           
zlib                               

After looking at the code in distutils I *think* the problem is because
setup.py isn't coping with library filenames such as "libreadline.so.5"
and "libgdm.so.2" (with the .n) second extension.  

It looks like ccompiler.py#library_filename() just appends the
extension, which is .so for unix, and then
unixccompiler.py#find_library_file() does a simple os.path.exists() on
the name, not allowing for the additional numeric extension.  

Note that some library filenames in Linux have two or even three such
extensions, as in libreadline.so.5.2, and some extensions are not
all-numeric, as in libssl.so.0.9.8g.

Are you sure it isn't your Fedora installation that has the problem?  My
understanding is that the linker name (the libxxx.so name) should exist
and be a symbolic link to the most recent soname (libxxx.N).  So I think
distutils is doing the right thing.

See for example
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries.html, the
first section of which (I didn't read the whole thing) matches my
understanding of how this works.

Do you have any doc pointers that says Fedora doesn't work this way?

(Note that the libxxx.so linker name may not be in the same directory as
the sonames or the actual library files.)

I agree with David. The .so name must exist; if it doesn't, your
installation does indeed lack the necessary prerequisite.

Closing as invalid.