Gregory: there's no need to be a dick.  i'm pointing out the obvious --
bugs have been open literally for *years* with zero assistance/feedback
from anyone who can actually get things merged.  people have posted
patches, but no one has said "xxx needs to be done in order to get
merged".  you havent posted anything here either (assuming you're
someone who can actually get things merged and not just comment in a
tracker).  if you can at least do something with trackers, you should
start by marking 1597850 as a dupe of this one.  or you can simply prove
my point by continuing to contribute nothing.

the basic required changes are simple -- fix the few autoconf tests. 
getting automatic cross-detection (building a host python/pygen
automatically) isnt nearly as important as long as people have a way to
tell the build system to use a different python/pgen for build purposes.
 last i looked, these simple changes were pretty trivial to move across
major versions of python.

i fixed the chflags specific check a long time ago (as i imagine others
have as well):
http://sources.gentoo.org/dev-lang/python/files/python-2.6-chflags-cross.patch

same goes for the printf %zd test:
http://sources.gentoo.org/dev-lang/python/files/python-2.5-cross-printf.patch

however, unless these trivial baby steps can be made, worrying about the
next step (properly cross-compiling modules and such) is a complete
waste of time as these require diving into the python-specific build
system which does see a lot of churn over versions.