I see that Martin's broken record still hasn't changed. I had warm,
nostalgic feelings as I re-read this thread. It is so sad to see that
this matter remains unresolved almost 3 years after I filed this bug.

As usual Martin is just flat wrong in his insistence that a defined
CFLAGS must overide any generated CFLAGS by configure to be consistent
with other OSS. But of course that is just his excuse for not accepting
this bug and fix. If it wasn't this assertion then he would find
something else equally absurd.

Does anyone know the meaning of NIH?

I'll bet that this matter will never be resolved until the Python
community simply takes Python and re-hosts it somewhere else as
OpenPython. As long as Martin is the gatekeeper you can be assured that
this bug (or any bug) that he doesn't agree with will never be accepted
or fixed and if he does accept this bug - he will insist on doing it the
wrong way (by overriding CFLAGS) to prove he was 'right' all along -
that this bug fix will break more than it fixes.

Keep up the good work Martin. I am expecting that this bug will continue
to provide me with nostalgic memories well into my retirement...  ;-)