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

It would be great if both patches were applied to 2.7 also.

> 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.

Patch2 makes test_distutils worse because LDSHARED refers to a file that only exists when Python is installed.  If one tests in tree, the files don't exist.  This may be related to the existence of BLDSHARED, used to build modules in the source tree, which can be overridden separately -- otherwise it defaults to LDSHARED.  If the rest of the testsuite ever is cleaned up for AIX, one either could skip the parts of test_distutils that require the LDSHARED files or add special hooks in the test for AIX.  As you point out, the change doesn't make the current testsuite results situation any worse.