Ned Deily:
> My preference remains to not make the flags change at all

Well, "m" in ABI flags became useless around Python 3.4. I don't see the point of pretending that the "m" ABI is different and then provide two names for the same thing:

    python3.8 and python3.8m
    python3.8-config and python3.8m-config
    man python3.8 and man python3.8m
    etc.

I'm not sure why, but on Fedora /usr/bin/python3.7 and /usr/bin/python3.7m are two separated files... with the same content (ex: same MD5 sum). Well, it's just 17 KiB each :-) /usr/bin/python3.7-config is a symlink to python3.7m-config.

The change itself is painful for distributors like Red Hat (Fedora, RHEL), but things should be simpler once the change is done.

My long-term goal is to get a single ABI for everything: CPython, PyPy, RustPython, MicroPython, etc. :-) Maybe it's not possible, but at least I would like to move towards this goal!

Overall project:

* https://docs.python.org/3.8/whatsnew/3.8.html#debug-build-uses-the-same-abi-as-release-build
* https://pythoncapi.readthedocs.io/