(fixes #1496539)

Remove various dependencies on dictionary order in the standard library
tests, and one (clearly an oversight, potentially critical) in the
standard library itself - base64.py.

Remaining open issues:
 * test_extcall is an output test, messy to make robust
 * tarfile.py has a potential bug here, but I'm not familiar
   enough with this code.  Filed in as SF bug #1496501.
 * urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgr() returns a random result if there is more
   than one matching root path.  I'm asking python-dev for
   clarification...

performance measurements.

The module is currently just a proof-of-concept implementation, but
will integrated into pybench once it is stable enough.

License: pybench license.
Author: Marc-Andre Lemburg.

Make some functions that should have been static static.

Fix a bunch of refleaks by fixing the definition of
MiddlingExtendsException.

Remove all the __new__ implementations apart from
BaseException_new.  Rewrite most code that needs it to cope with
NULL fields (such code could get excercised anyway, the
__new__-removal just makes it more likely).  This involved
editing the code for WindowsError, which I can't test.

This fixes all the refleaks in at least the start of a regrtest
-R :: run.

claim that Erik von Blokland is the author of the
installer picture.

Contributed by Bjorn Tillenius.

Fix a number of problems with the need for speed code:

One is doing this sort of thing:

    Py_DECREF(self->field);
    self->field = newval;
    Py_INCREF(self->field);

without being very sure that self->field doesn't start with a
value that has a __del__, because that almost certainly can lead
to segfaults.

As self->args is constrained to be an exact tuple we may as well
exploit this fact consistently.  This leads to quite a lot of
simplification (and, hey, probably better performance).

Add some error checking in places lacking it.

Fix some rather strange indentation in the Unicode code.

Delete some trailing whitespace.

More to come, I haven't fixed all the reference leaks yet...

and use it for string copy operations.  this gives a 20% speedup on some
string benchmarks.

bug in both:  `className` was referenced before being checked for NULL.

Avoid obsolescence by directly referring to the section.

allocations.  Use PyMem_MALLOC for larger (1k+) chunks.  1%-2% speedup.

Add a PCBuild8 build directory for building with Visual Studio .NET 2005.  Contains a special project to perform profile guided optimizations on the pythoncore.dll, by instrumenting and running pybench.py

to enable use from stringobject

where appropriate

Windows failures.  Who's keeping a bz2 file open?

lining killed performance on certain Intel boxes, and the "aggressive"
macro itself gives most of the benefits on others.