Original patch by Julien Courteau and Pierre Paul Lefebvre.

Issue #16602: When a weakref's target was part of a long deallocation chain, the object could remain reachable through its weakref even though its refcount had dropped to zero.

Thanks to Eugene Toder for diagnosing and reporting the issue.

There was a window between the write and the chmod where the user’s
password would be exposed, depending on default permissions.  Philip
Jenvey’s patch fixes it.

These files are created by some NFS clients a file is edited and removed
concurrently (see added link in doc for more info).  If such a file is
removed between distutils calls listdir and copy, it will get confused.
Other special files are ignored in sdist (namely VCS directories), but
this has to be filtered out earlier.

Patch by Steven Kryskalla.

Patch by Ilya Sandler.

encoded/decoded to/from UTF-8/surrogateescape, instead of the locale encoding
(which may be ASCII if no locale environment variable is set), to avoid
inconsistencies with os.fsencode() and os.fsdecode() functions which are
already using UTF-8/surrogateescape.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

Patch by Jonathan Kotta.

Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.

#16549: Make json.tool work again on Python 3 and add tests.  Initial patch by Berker Peksag and Serhiy Storchaka.

Initial patch by Virgil Dupras.

This commit adds "parameter" to the glossary, improves and consolidates the
"argument" glossary entry, and adds a question to the FAQ on the difference
between arguments and parameters.

initialization. If the interpreter is shut down and reinitialized (embedded
CPython), the old module dictionary was not dec-refed during the next import of
the time extension module.

Contributed by Torsten Marek of Google.

Issue #12848: The pure Python pickle implementation now treats object lengths as unsigned 32-bit integers, like the C implementation does.
Patch by Serhiy Storchaka.