Comment 3 for bug 424481

I think it's mostly Gentoo. There's this system of "USE" flags in Gentoo which allow customizing packages at build-time to include or exclude features such as GUI toolkit support, alsa, and python just to mention a few. (Build-time ~ install-time in Gentoo as the default way to install packages is from source).

I don't use Gentoo, but as the basic functionality seems to work fine without Python I think the Gentoo folks would appreciate the option of building without it.

(I forgot to include "config.h" in some places, here's a fixed patch)