It looks like the change from plain config to config-<ABI> was made in Issue 9807 (r86731, 3.2). So the patch seems reasonable to me; it is just catching up with that change.

This bug was marked for 2.7 as well. Is there anything that needs to be done for 2.7?

How does patch 2 make the test_distutils situation worse? Is there anything that should be done to improve things first, or should that just be handled independently? I see that the 2.7 and 3.5 buildbots are currently failing with errors like

distutils.errors.LinkError: command './Modules/ld_so_aix' failed with exit status 1

while 3.6 is failing with

distutils.errors.LinkError: command '/usr/local/lib/python3.6/config/ld_so_aix' failed with exit status 1

Presumably the 3.6 failure may be helped by Patch 2, since it is complaining about the plain “config” path.