The thread John Nagle started about building Python 2.5 on Fedora Core 6 led me to implement a slight change to Python's setup.py. You clearly can't have the build stop if the bits needed to build a particular module aren't found or if compiling a module fails, but it's fairly straightforward to note which modules could be built and which can't be. There's a patch for setup.py on SourceForge you can try if you want:
http://python.org/sf/1673619 When setup.py is run it emits output like this after checking for modules it knows how to build (this is from my Mac): Located the necessary bits to build these modules: _AE _AH _App _bisect _bsddb _CarbonEvt _CF _CG _Cm _codecs_cn _codecs_hk _codecs_iso2022 _codecs_jp _codecs_kr _codecs_tw _collections _csv _Ctl _ctypes _ctypes_test _curses _curses_panel _Dlg _Drag _elementtree _Evt _File _Fm _Folder _functools _hashlib _heapq _Help _hotshot _IBCarbon _Icn _Launch _List _locale _lsprof _Menu _Mlte _multibytecodec _OSA _Qd _Qdoffs _Qt _random _Res _Scrap _Snd _socket _sqlite3 _ssl _struct _TE _testcapi _tkinter _weakref _Win array audioop autoGIL binascii bsddb185 bz2 cmath ColorPicker cPickle crypt cStringIO datetime dbm dl fcntl gestalt grp icglue imageop itertools MacOS math mmap Nav nis operator OSATerminology parser pwd pyexpat readline resource rgbimg select strop syslog termios time unicodedata Failed to find the necessary bits to build these modules: _elementtree _md5 _sha _sha256 _sha512 gdbm linuxaudiodev ossaudiodev spwd Feel free to add comments to the above patch page. It will help the development team decide whether or not it's a worthwhile addition. Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list