The current PR8709 resolves two issues, not one - so will create a new issue for the second element.

Am also shorting the NEWS text, with the expanded explanation here as:

* skip the distutils test 'test_search_cpp' when not gcc as compiler
  because not all compilers, e.g. IBM xlc et al do not support
  redirected stdout when using the argument -E (aka cpp_preprocessing)
  while gcc is know to support the pair -E -o outputfile

The additional find while researching this issue:
* add the argument '-C' for AIX xlc cpp processing so comments are
    included in the cpp output rather than replaced by a single ' ' (space) char.