Gotcha.  Not sure how far off Gentoo is from supporting 2.6 -- our
primary package manager relies on it, so the updates tend to be slow.
for moving to new versions.

Do you guys maintain any kind of an "internals" guide to the build
system anywhere?  Like an outline or such of what happens from start to
finish when you run setup.py (I think that's the start, anyways)?  I see
there's quite a bit of autotools components plugged in, but it's
intermixed with some of the python code itself.

Looking at some of the other bugs, there definitely seems to be some
cross-compiling capability that's made it in -- as evidenced by a good
chunk of the core build cross-compiling fine (the _Socket extension is
the one glaring error I'm after at the moment).  So it looks like it
just needs some better touch up....on 2.5 at least.

Currently, we're using the patch from Issue #1115, and I'm going to take
a stab at adapting the 2.5.1 patch in Issue #1597850 to see if it takes
me any farther.