bpo-1294959 has been fixed by commit 8510f430781118d9b603c3a2f06945d6ebc5fe42, but this issue is about "./configure with no parameters".

This issue seems to be about OpenSuSE downstream patches: "just compiling and installing from source on OpenSUSE 42.3."

I found multiple similar old issues.

bpo-15631: "Python 3.3/3.4 installation issue on OpenSUSE lib/lib64 folders", "error: ImportError: No module named 'atexit'". The reporter used downstream patch: "I applied the OpenSUSE patch".

=> closed as a duplicate of bpo-1294959

* bpo-18092: "Python 2.7.5 installation broken on OpenSuse 12.2", error: "ImportError: No module named _collections". The reporter never explained how Python was configured: "Please provide exactly what ./configure options you used to build Python and any "make install" options."

=> closed as a duplicate of bpo-1294959

* bpo-30633: "Python 3.6.1 installation issues on OpenSuse 42.1: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'", error: "Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: Unable to get the locale encoding". Same reporter name than bpo-18092 "Andreas Jung", but different bugs.python.org login name ("zopyx" vs "Andreas.Jung". The reporter says that he used "the standard ./configure --prefix=... --enable-optimizations" but not if he applied any OpenSuSE downstream patch.

=> closed as out of date in 2019 after 2 years of inactivity