[replying to myself again...]

A similar problem happens when building 3.6 and 3.7 too.  Details at end.

On Wed, 9 Dec 2020, Mark Geisert wrote:
Hi Marco,
I was building Python locally so I can later submit a patch against it. It appears the local python.exe was built successfully, but a later step failed with:

./python.exe -E -S -m sysconfig --generate-posix-vars ;\
if test $? -ne 0 ; then \
        echo "generate-posix-vars failed" ; \
        rm -f ./pybuilddir.txt ; \
        exit 1 ; \
fi
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/src/python38-3.8.3-1.src/python38-3.8.3-1.x86_64/src/Python-3.8.3/Lib/runpy.py", line 194, in _run_module_as_main
    return _run_code(code, main_globals, None,
File "/usr/src/python38-3.8.3-1.src/python38-3.8.3-1.x86_64/src/Python-3.8.3/Lib/runpy.py", line 87, in _run_code
    exec(code, run_globals)
File "/usr/src/python38-3.8.3-1.src/python38-3.8.3-1.x86_64/src/Python-3.8.3/Lib/sysconfig.py", line 711, in <module>
    _main()
File "/usr/src/python38-3.8.3-1.src/python38-3.8.3-1.x86_64/src/Python-3.8.3/Lib/sysconfig.py", line 699, in _main
    _generate_posix_vars()
File "/usr/src/python38-3.8.3-1.src/python38-3.8.3-1.x86_64/src/Python-3.8.3/Lib/sysconfig.py", line 416, in _generate_posix_vars
    f.write(pybuilddir)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode characters in position 17-19: surrogates not allowed
generate-posix-vars failed
make: *** [Makefile:592: pybuilddir.txt] Error 1
*** ERROR: make failed

I've seen UnicodeEncodeError before and searched and found how to fix it.. but hitting the issue while building Python itself seems more fraught. Is this a known issue with known fix?

This seems to be a problem setting up a platform-specific build directory. The sysconfig.py script wants to use "lib." + platform + pythonversion but the platform string somehow gets corrupted into non-utf8 bytes. For instance, building Python 3.8 comes up with:
    lib.cygwin-\365\377\377o-\377o-3.8
as the directory name. Broken, but could work. The build failure happens because the script tries to write this directory name into a file but it's not a valid utf8 string. The directory name should have been:
    lib.cygwin-3.2.0-x86_64-3.8

I'm trying to debug further, learning Python as I go.  Whee....

..mark

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