I don't really use Mageia anymore, that said:

> I should note that after I do «unset PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE» [snip]

Yep, this is a long-lasting Mageia issue. See:
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=50484
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3348

You could try arguing with the maintainer (Michael Scherer) but he seems both stubborn and slightly clueless about anything Python-related, unfortunately.

> all tests pass except for test_ftp.py, which gives me this

You are not the only one getting the test_ftp failure. I guess Giampaolo didn't fix it well enough.

> However, I don't see the bdist_rpm anywhere in the output

Individual test cases are only listed on failure, or when verbose mode is specified. So, if it doesn't appear in the output, it passed.