I don't recall what the issue was the resulted in the check-in that you mention. Sadly enough it is not-trivial to find that check-in I mention due to the migration from Subversion to Mercurial.

How was python itself configured (configure command line)? What OS are you running on? Given the shell prompt I'd say Mint Linux. And finally, is '~/Repos/cpython/python' a checkout or installed location (that is, did you run 'make install')?

Based on code inspection I'd say that your change is correct, and my change only works when running from the build directory.