Brian Cameron from Oracle has requested a fix for Python 2.6. I have attached a patch for 2.6. In order to compile and test the patch I had to modify _ssl.c to handle OPENSSL_NO_SSL2. I also copied keycert.pem from 2.7 to fix two test failures. The former keycert.pem has expired.

It's a bit of a challenge to compile Python 2.6 on modern Linux OS. I had to set a couple of flags and overwrite MACHDEP:

export arch=$(dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_MULTIARCH)
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib/$arch -L/lib/$arch"
export CFLAGS="-I/usr/include/$arch"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/$arch"
./configure --config-cache --with-pydebug
make -j4 MACHDEP=linux2