> is there a need for the built vs. installed prefix?
>    this is logic not found in the python implementation.
>    what is this supposed to do?

You are right, it is not found in the original python implementation, but I feel that it's useful. Without it, you couldn't give someone a -devel style precompiled Python archive that they can extract where-ever they want and embed in other software without requiring them to install it to the same prefix used during the build process.

> is `local' available in all shells? just avoid it.

I can't be sure about all shells, but local is *very* well supported (bash, dash, csh); I'm happy to remove it though as it's not necessary.

> LDLIBRARY and LDSHARED are expressed in terms of Makefile
>   macros, leading to syntax errors.

This shouldn't be the case, see:

# Replace makefile compat. variable references with shell script compat. ones; $(VAR) -> ${VAR}
+	sed -e "s,\$$(\([A-Za-z0-9_]*\)),\$$\{\1\},g" < Misc/python-config.sh >python-config.sh

> - --includes doesn't include the plat specific include dir

You are right, I will correct this oversight.

> - abi flags are missing from the include and lib dirs.

ABIFLAGS propagates through other variables, namely LDLIBRARY and LDVERSION, but again, there are some issues for me to fix with this.

I will write a new part on my build script that compares the output from the shell script with that from the python script and post a new patch when they agree 100% on all my test platforms.