RE: msg134751 - Thanks for responding, George -

This bug is still an issue for me, as even though I now have Python-3.3
having passed its test suite, installed and running OK, and even
went so far as to 'cd /usr/bin; rm -f python; ln -s python3.3 python;'
(/usr/bin/python2.7 executable still exists) all the software
I now attempt to build insists on using python2 , which is built
against an old glibc and has started giving anomalous results
after upgrade to newer glibc - see : 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=648863
where I found that my python-2.7 was failing to 
 'from . import config'
whereas the FC-14 python 2.7 got past this .

So I still need to find a way of building python 2.7.1 to replace
my broken old system python2 .

When I tried this, doing :
$ /usr/src/Python-2.7.1/configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 --enable-shared CXX=${CXX} CXXFLAGS="$CXXFLAGS"

(I only added the CXX= args because configure complained that while
 I did have $CXX set to /usr/bin/g++ , "c++" would be used )

the build failed complaining that the 'bsddb185 dl gdbm' modules
could not be built; I had to change the $CPPFLAGS to contain
'-I/usr/include/db4' and --libs to contain '-ldb-4.5 -lgdbm' and
comment out and modify the lines in Module/Setup :

  #dl dlmodule.c
...
  #gdbm gdbmmodule.c -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -lgdbm
...
  #_bsddb _bsddb.c -I$(DBINC) -L$(DBLIB) -ldb-$(DBLIBVER)

and then the build succeeded , but with these errors from dlmodule :

test_dl
test test_dl crashed -- <type 'exceptions.SystemError'>: module dl requires sizeof(int) == sizeof(long) == sizeof(char*)

My point is, if this test_dl works only in 32-bit mode, it should
have failed during its build, not during test !
If it is meant to be 32-bit only, say something like :

#if __LONG_MAX__ > 0xffffffff
#error dlmodule only works in 32-bit mode.
#endif