> the proposed patch has still some issues:
>
>  - it breaks the installation on 64bit platforms on Debian and Ubuntu.
>    Please test the patch on one of these platforms too.
>
>  - it hardcodes more platform information in the sys modules, which
>    makes it difficult to overwrite for cross builds. If these macros
>    are needed then they should be taken from the sysconfig module,
>    using the _sysconfigdata module.
>
>  - use the host macros in the configure instead of uname
>
>  - LIB shouldn't be necessary when configuring --with-libdir

Sorry, I don't have access to anything but the OpenSUSE systems at
work.  I was just verifying that it solved my installation problems.
I'll see if I can nudge some of the other things forward.