gobject-introspection AIX 6.1 porting problems

[Steve Talmage <stalmage yahoo com>]

I've been trying to compile the current Gnome desktop on my AIX 6.1 system for 
over a month now, but I keep getting stuck on gobject-introspection.  I've tried 
everything I can think of (I've even blown away and rebuilt my entire build 
environment twice), but I just can't get it to build.

I'm using version 0.9.7 of g-i (I had to give up on 0.6.14 for a variety of 
reasons) that I got through git.  Neither version seems to build correctly on 
AIX out of the box--I had to add a number of hacks to get g-i to play nice with 
AIX's shared object (library) model.

I have gotten g-i to build up to GIMarshallingTests in the tests directory.  
After resolving a number of core dump and symbol not found errors, I'm now stuck 
on the following problem that I haven't been able to figure out.

The GIMarshallingTests program starts up and runs for a few seconds, and then I 
get the following traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../tools/g-ir-scanner", line 45, in <module>
    sys.exit(scanner_main(sys.argv))
  File 
"/opt/freeware/gnome2/src/gobject-introspection/giscanner/scannermain.py", line 
349, in scanner_main
    main.transform()
  File 
"/opt/freeware/gnome2/src/gobject-introspection/giscanner/maintransformer.py", 
line 61, in transform
    self._namespace.walk(self._pass_fixup_hidden_fields)
  File "/opt/freeware/gnome2/src/gobject-introspection/giscanner/ast.py", line 
422, in walk
    node.walk(callback, [])
  File "/opt/freeware/gnome2/src/gobject-introspection/giscanner/ast.py", line 
498, in walk
    res = callback(self, chain)
  File 
"/opt/freeware/gnome2/src/gobject-introspection/giscanner/maintransformer.py", 
line 117, in _pass_fixup_hidden_fields
    if (field.name.startswith('_')
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'startswith'
make: *** [GIMarshallingTests-1.0.gir] Error 1

I have no idea what any of this means, and I can't tell if this is caused by 
some shared library or symbol resolution issue or something else.  Google 
searches have been fruitless.

Any ideas?