Before this goes any farther, let me make this clear - I *did not* develop this patch.  It was developed by the OpenSUSE folks.  I had trouble installing Python from source on the OpenSUSE system under my desk at work.  I asked about the problem on python-list@python.org.  Someone directed me to this open bug report.  I saw the reference to the patch, applied it, and installed.  I verified that the installed Python executable now works as I expected, and reported that.  That is all I did.  Various responses seem to suggest that people think I wrote the patch.  I did not.  I didn't even look at the contents of the patch before applying it.  I regenerated it relative to the current hg trunk simply because when I first applied it, a couple chunks were applied with offsets.

If my feedback is not sufficient to help move this bug report forward, my apologies.  I know next to nothing about writing configure scripts, let alone the right way to do that.  I don't mess around at this level of things any more.  Haven't in at least a decade.  I don't know what a host macro is.  I have never used --libdir.  If people are looking to me to correct the flaws in this patch, they are likely going to wait for awhile.