Just found this ticket and apparently late to the game...

Some comments:

It is already possible to selectively build Python C extension modules in the stdlib via editing the Modules/Setup file and this is a lot better to maintain than a long list of configure options.

Martin's suggestion to add support for a *disabled* option would make this even easier. This would also complement the *static* and *shared* option we have for Modules/Setup to define modules to compile into the main executable rather than as shared module.

The only bit that's missing (if really needed), is to prevent setup.py from building modules not listed in Modules/Setup as shared libs. This could be had with a single configure option, e.g. --disable-setuppy-builds.

But all that said, I don't think, it's really necessary to cripple Python just to save some image space. As you can see with our eGenix PyRun runtime, it is possible to compress Python down to just a few MBs:

http://www.egenix.com/products/python/PyRun/

while still having most of the stdlib readily available.