Based upon Barry's speculation that something might have changed in the configure process I mv'd my config.cache out of the way before configuring (like Barry, after a cvs up -A). I was a bit surprised to see these changes:
% diff config.cache.save config.cache | less 185a186 > ac_cv_pthread_system_supported=${ac_cv_pthread_system_supported=no} 190c191 < ac_cv_sizeof_fpos_t=${ac_cv_sizeof_fpos_t=12} --- > ac_cv_sizeof_fpos_t=${ac_cv_sizeof_fpos_t=16} 194c195 < ac_cv_sizeof_off_t=${ac_cv_sizeof_off_t=4} --- > ac_cv_sizeof_off_t=${ac_cv_sizeof_off_t=8}
Given that my system hasn't changed in the past couple of days, I wonder why it thought the default size of some of these offsets should change. (New update of configure, perhaps?) Still, I had no problem building on my Mandrake 8.0 system.
It has to do with this NEWS item: - Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose kernel has large file support. I believe there's an SF bug report mentioning the same problem that Barry reports. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)