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(Not anonymous: Jeff Kotula, Vital Images, Inc.)

"Bug" is probably not the right classification. I believe
it is a weakness in the configuration management though.

Here's the problem: As a client of the C API, I want to
be able to create a static library that is compiled
with DEBUG and/or _DEBUG and be able to select either
the debug or non-debug version of the python library
independently. This helps me stay as close as possible to
production-level configuration even when debugging some
parts of the system.

From your preceding discussion it sounds like the only
real barrier to this is the coupling of _DEBUG to Py_DEBUG.
If this is the case, it should be a small matter to
decouple the two. Changing the layout of objects could also
be avoided simply by always including the reference counting
field -- would it be that big of a percentage increase in
object size?