Interestingly enough, the distutils failure that dmalcolm found was present in the trunk even before my patch.  If you build Python with --enable-shared, that distutils test fails because of the default path used for the -L option.  I fixed that in my patch, but it was unrelated to the changes I made to expose sys.abiflags.

I wonder if we should try to get a buildbot up that uses --enable-shared?