After configuring, making and make installing the
svn-trunk version with sunstudio11 on a Solaris 9 box,
an extra '-xcode=pic32' argument is added to the
compile-command when I try to install numarray using
the setup.py that comes with numarray.

To configure python I first executed:

export CC=cc
export CFLAGS="-xarch=v9" # to force 64bit compilation
export EXTRA_CFLAGS="-xarch=v9" # 
export CXX=CC
export CXXFLAGS="-xarch=v9"
export F77=f77
export FFLAGS="-xarch=v9"
export LDFLAGS="-xarch=v9"

Note that EXTRA_CFLAGS needs to be defined too,
otherwise python itself will not be compiled with the
-xarch=v9 option.

Afterwards I want to install numarray using the
setup.py (`python setup.py install` command). During
compilation of numarray I can however see that
distutils is adding -xcode=pic32 on the command-line.
Afterwards distutils is not able to link because there
now is a mix of 32bit and 64bit code.

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You must be misunderstanding something. -xcode=pic32 does
*not* mean that the code ought to be compiled for the 32-bit
processor mode. Instead, it means that the PIC (position
independent code) offsets are encoded using 32-bit numbers,
which works for both 32-bit and 64-bit code as long as the
size of the code does not exceed 4GiB.

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Indeed the -xcode=pic32 is not at fault here. The problem
though still is that distutils is not linking the shared
libraries using the link-option '-xarch=v9'. The linker
therefore complains about a mix of 32bit and 64bit code.

Should'nt distutils copy the content of LDFLAGS of when
python is being configured and add these options to the
link-line ?

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Something like that, yes. It's quite involved, so it is not
easy to see what the right approach is.

If you can come up with a patch that works for you, I can
review the patch to find out what else it breaks.

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Looking through the code of distutils I finally found that
plenty of information is recoved from the _current_
environment in distutils/sysconfig.py.

Thus the LDFLAGS env.var. I had defined when configuring
python is not stored somewhere. So when e.g. installing
numarray, I need to set the LDFLAGS env.var. again.

Would'nt it be better if python would store the
flags/options that were used to compile python itself. This
guarantees that the extension modules will be
compiled/linked with the same flags and guarantees a maximal
compatibility?

If you prefer to move this discussion to the python-ml ....

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Yes, please move discussion to python-dev, although
discussion of the build process usually fails to attract
anybody.

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Done.

AFAIAC you can close this issue or we wait for the outcome
of the discussion on python-dev

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Based on last comment, I'm closing this report.