Thanks. Yes have confirmed with the Alpine maintainer that tls/ssl is disabled on the current package. Looking into how to re-enable it. Also btree is disabled. I think I've figured out how to re-enable that.

The problem I'm having with building with tls/ssl is that the make process wants to link in the mbedtls object files from its own source tree. I can download micropython's own lib version of mbedtls, but can't build that successfully in-tree. I have libmbedtls.a files and so on with the needed binaries, from my packaging system, but can't figure out yet how to get micropython to use those. I have to solve one of those two problems to proceed further

On a regular Alpine system yes do use python3. But this is for a resource constrained device (Pi Zero 2w) where I'm hoping to keep the os and infrastructure minimal.

Figured out how to fix the Alpine packaging.

On a regular Alpine system yes do use python3. But this is for a resource constrained device (Pi Zero 2w) where I'm hoping to keep the os and infrastructure minimal.

Fair enough. Almost any distro makes heavy use of Python, so it'll probably be there on Alpine anyway. And to call a 4-core machine with ½ GB RAM resource constrained ... I used to run a server with 40 simultaneous users on a smaller system