For the record, this would have been solved more than a year ago already.

When this change was proposed more than a year ago it was rejected with "There is no need to add more configure flags to build Python with a custom OpenSSL installation. " yet now it's ok to add a new option --with-openssl-rpath https://bugs.python.org/issue43466 ?

And the first comment there, from python core dev nonetheless, is suggesting static linking as well. Emm... this would have been solved year and half ago. I would be happy to completely drop my proposed (and approved on gihub) changes and implement it in a different way.

The maintainer's attitude as demonstrated here can be really harmful in open-source projects (many of us still remember eglibc fork back in the day) but fortunately this is the first time I noticed such attitude among python developers.

Importantly the issue is resolved now (did it take a request from IBM's customer to get this implemented ;-) ?) and hopefully a lesson learnt and Christian will be more welcoming and less judgemental of outsiders' contributions.