PR 17420 fixes cross-compilation of third-party extension modules.
The PYTHON_PROJECT_BASE environment variable is the path to the directory where Python has been cross-compiled. It is used by the native python interpreter to find the target sysconfigdata module.
For example the following command builds a wheel file to be transfered and installed with pip on the target platform, provided the native python interpreter and the cross-compiled one both have the wheel package installed:
$ PYTHON_PROJECT_BASE=/path/to/builddir python setup.py bdist_wheel