Patches: I’m not sure, but maybe it would help the Reitveld review system if the src/ directory in them was eliminated (e.g. src/Python-3.5.1 vs just Python-3.5.1). Also, if you are using Gnu diff, maybe you can try the -N (--new-file) option to include aixutil.py in the diff, and -x (--exclude) __pycache__ to avoid that directory.

Personally, I would find patches a lot easier to handle than a tar file, especially if I cannot figure out which bits of the tar file are original code and which are changed code.

It seems you want to CDLL() to accept names using the Linux/BSD libFOO.so.N convention, but load an AIX library with a related name. This sounds like a bad design to me, for multiple reasons. I would like to hear other people’s opinions before going in that direction.

This is my understanding of the CDLL() calls currently needed to load the Open SSL library on various platforms:

openssl 1.0.2.g-3 package on Arch Linux: CDLL("libcrypto.so.1.0.0")
Windows: CDLL("libeay32.dll")
OS X (Darwin): CDLL("libcrypto.1.0.0.dylib")
FreeBSD: CDLL("libcrypto.so.8")
AIX: CDLL("libcrypto.a(libcrypto.so.1.0.0)", DEFAULT_MODE | RTLD_MEMBER)