I have an Itanium Linux system where compiling Python's _ssl module fails for some reason, with the consequence that there is no md5 support at all in the resulting Python 2.7.5 installation.

With Python 2.7.4, setup.py didn't even try to compile _ssl, instead it compiled the _sha, _md5, _sha256, _sha512 modules and it worked.

With Python 2.7.5, setup.py somehow thinks that _ssl should work, tries to compile _ssl, which fails and (this is the real failure): it doesn't try anymore to compile the _sha, _md5, _sha256, _sha512 modules.