After a bit of inspection, the root of this FTBFS seems to be dpkg-buildpackage having set LDFLAGS in the environment (even to an empty value, mind you).
The generated Makefiles set 'LDFLAGS = -z,defs', and as LDFLAGS was previously in the environment, this new value is exported to processes spawned from make. Python's distutils honour LDFLAGS, and when building the python extension passes -z,defs to the linker, and the build obviously bombs. I guess the solution is to accept LDFLAGS is to be exported, and to make the part that builds python be robust against that. CCing -devel as a generic place so that reading it may save somebody somewhere some work some day. ;) Cheers, -- Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es Debian Developer adeodato at debian.org The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw