Hi. My 2 cents about this: (well I'm only a noob) I had this problem; I don't know about other people's environment, but my environment's problem was that it was actually not POSIX-compliant: it didn't have other file functions as well, but anyway the `fstat` error is the FIRST error you get when you compile in such environments, so people as unaware as me think the problem is with fstat only. Anyway I think if you are going to remove anything, you should think in terms of POSIX-compliancy of the target system. Removing HAVE_FSTAT might be fine (as user can easily write his own version of the function and have it included into the python's sources), but if you instead provide the user with the ability to use his custom functions when POSIX one's aren't available, it would help make python compile on even more platforms. Sorry if this last one was off-topic. Best regards.