Hello,

I just tried your patch on latest svn (r84707), but I found out that the problem I reported can no more be reproduced. First, '_locale' seems now to be built earlier. Also, a fallback has been introduced in 'locale.getpreferredencoding'. When '_locale' cannot be imported, the encoding is now parsed from the environment variables (cf 'Lib/locale.py', line 558 and below). It looks like 'locale.getpreferredencoding' is now no more likely to fail than 'sys.getfilesystemencoding'. So I'm not sure if a patch is still needed at all.

In case a patch still makes sense, pay attention that there now also is a 'Lib/sysconfig.py', which also has a '_parse_makefile' function. This function uses a logic similar to the one in 'Lib/distutils/sysconfig.py', even thought it uses the builtin 'open', so it would need the same fix, if one is needed.

Cheers, B.