make sure that all included components work)

 assorted xml.etree tweaks

build problem on AIX.

Strip off leading dots and slash so the generated files are the same regardless
of whether you configure in the checkout directory or build.

If anyone configures in a different directory, we might want a cleaner
approach using os.path.*().  Hopefully this is good enough.

If a line had multiple semi-colons and ended with a semi-colon, we would
loop too many times and access a NULL node.  Exit the loop early if
there are no more children.

In C++, it's an error to pass a string literal to a char* function
without a const_cast().  Rather than require every C++ extension
module to put a cast around string literals, fix the API to state the
const-ness.

I focused on parts of the API where people usually pass literals:
PyArg_ParseTuple() and friends, Py_BuildValue(), PyMethodDef, the type
slots, etc.  Predictably, there were a large set of functions that
needed to be fixed as a result of these changes.  The most pervasive
change was to make the keyword args list passed to
PyArg_ParseTupleAndKewords() to be a const char *kwlist[].

One cast was required as a result of the changes:  A type object
mallocs the memory for its tp_doc slot and later frees it.
PyTypeObject says that tp_doc is const char *; but if the type was
created by type_new(), we know it is safe to cast to char *.

This enables even impatient people to run tests that require remote
files such as test_normalization and test_codecmaps_*.

meaningless numbers, but I figured out I would fix that bug anyway.

You apparently can seek(0) on sys.stdin on OS X.
But you can't go backwards, so seek(-1).

[ 1346144 ] Segfaults from unaligned loads in floatobject.c

by using memcpy and not just blinding casting char* to double*.

Thanks to Rune Holm for the report.

[Bug #1164912] Ensure Datetime wrapper class .value attribute is an 8-bit string, not a Unicode string

asked to read tens of megabytes of data.  On my Mac, it hits MemoryErrors
when reading around 15Mb in one chunk.  The fix is to read the body in several
parts, not as one big piece.

It would be nice to fix the underlying socket.read() problem, too.

2.4 bugfix candidate.

Remove sorting HOWTO, after converting it to a wiki page at http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting