Embedding Python at the OS level - build problems

[Phil Frost]

Greetings all. I'm attempting to embed a python interpreter at a very
low level in an OS I am writing. Currently I'm stuck with build issues.
Firstly, as there is no working C compiler in our OS, I must cross
compile Python. I encountered errors when building Parser/pgen; I got
around this by building it nativly and copying it. Hopefully this won't
get me later...

My current problem (and there are sure to be more ;) ) is when building
Modules/posixmodule.c. I've already done a great deal of hacking;  I
manually commented the inclusion of stropts.h as it was getting it from
/usr/include which is not part of the target machine's include files.
That was probably not a good idea, but hey...

Now, I get:

/home/indigo/dev/uuu/uuu/lib/c/bin-i386/diet gcc  -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -I. -I./Include  -DPy_BUILD_CORE  -c ./Modules/posixmodule.c -o Modules/posixmodule.o
Modules/posixmodule.c: In function `posix_openpty':
Modules/posixmodule.c:2623: warning: implicit declaration of function `ioctl'
Modules/posixmodule.c:2623: error: `I_PUSH' undeclared (first use in this function)
Modules/posixmodule.c:2623: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
Modules/posixmodule.c:2623: error: for each function it appears in.)
Modules/posixmodule.c: In function `posix_setgroups':
Modules/posixmodule.c:4527: error: `MAX_GROUPS' undeclared (first use in this function)

I really have a swarm of questions. Among them are:

- is there a better way to cross compile python?
- is there anything I can do about the above error?

But most importantly:

- is the posix module really required? At the moment, I'm interested in
  only getting a minimal Python working, so anything that can be
  disabled, should be. What things can I do to eliminate all features,
  modules, and whatever that isn't required to build libpython2.3.a?