methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
which was missing for no apparent reason.

first day of the week.

[ 987287 ] Python 2.4a1, interpreter hanging on Keyboard Interrupt

couple of these are currently found in index data, but these should
all be handled in the same way.

Closes SF bug #952737.

Need to return -1 on error.

Needs backport.

isn't always set to an integer value when it's defined.

[ 960406 ] unblock signals in threads

although the changes do not correspond exactly to any patch attached to
that report.

Non-main threads no longer have all signals masked.

A different interface to readline is used.

The handling of signals inside calls to PyOS_Readline is now rather
different.

These changes are all a bit scary!  Review and cross-platform testing
much appreciated.

[Bug #925107] Make .readline() consider self.stop.  This makes read() and readline() very similar, so they're refactored into _read.  Patch by Johannes Gijsbers.
2.3 bugfix candidate.

Rearrange code for writable() case to make the parallel logic clearer

Fixes SF #984290.

a typo.

Patch from Mark Hammond:

bdist_wininst attempts to use the correct MSVC runtime for the current
version of Python. This doesn't work correctly when --target-version
is set. In that case, bdist_wininst still uses the *current*
sys.version (ie, 2.4) rather than the version specified as
--target-version. Thus, the msvc7 runtime based executable stub is
*always* used.

This patch "hard-codes" knowledge of earlier Python versions,
providing the correct result when Python 2.4 is used to build Python
2.3 and earlier distributions.

Remove the short variant (-v) of the --target-version command line
options, it conflicts with the --verbose/-v standard distutils switch.