I'm running into the same error while attempting to compile Python 3.8.1 on Ubuntu 18.04.

The actual test failure is this:

======================================================================
FAIL: test_errors_in_command (test.test_pdb.PdbTestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/Python-3.8.1/Lib/test/test_pdb.py", line 1580, in test_errors_in_command
    self.assertEqual(stdout.splitlines()[1:], [
AssertionError: Lists differ: ['(Pd[283 chars]efined", 'LEAVING RECURSIVE DEBUGGER', '(Pdb) ', '\x1b[?1034h'] != ['(Pd[283 chars]efined", 'LEAVING RECURSIVE DEBUGGER', '(Pdb) ']

First list contains 1 additional elements.
First extra element 9:
'\x1b[?1034h'

  ['(Pdb) *** SyntaxError: unexpected EOF while parsing',
   '(Pdb) ENTERING RECURSIVE DEBUGGER',
   '*** SyntaxError: unexpected EOF while parsing',
   'LEAVING RECURSIVE DEBUGGER',
   '(Pdb) ENTERING RECURSIVE DEBUGGER',
   '> <string>(1)<module>()',
   "((Pdb)) *** NameError: name 'doesnotexist' is not defined",
   'LEAVING RECURSIVE DEBUGGER',
-  '(Pdb) ',
?          ^

+  '(Pdb) ']
?          ^

-  '\x1b[?1034h']

----------------------------------------------------------------------

This failure only appeared after I installed additional packages and attempted to reconfigure and reinstall. The install command I used was this:

sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev libreadline-gplv2-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev