Closes bug #973901.  Thanks Brian Gough.

- misc. changes

SF patch #943898

Reads better when the iterable is a generator expression.

We need to write more; hopefully the barrier is a little lower now.

Make sure the start argument is not negative.

(Contributed by Andrew Gaul.)

a long time ago for VC6.

Beardsley.

If the seconds are different, we still need to calculate the differences
between milliseconds.

Also, on a Gentoo Linux (2.6.5) dual Athlon MP box with glibc 2.3,
time can go backwards.  This probably happens when the process switches
the CPU it's running on.  Time can also go backwards when running NTP.
If we detect a negative time delta (ie, time went backwards), return
a delta of 0.  This prevents an illegal array access elsewhere.
I think it's safest to *not* update prev_timeofday in this case, so we
return without updating.

Backport candidate.

Maxheap version of heapq.smallest() is forthcoming.

an alternate algorithm when the number of selected items is small
relative to the full iterable.

* Change a XDECREF to DECREF (adding an assertion just to be sure).

This is basically the support for package data from Phillip Eby's
setuptools package.  I've changed it only to fit it into the core
implementation rather than to live in subclasses, and added
documentation.

[ 971323 ] make test_signal less annoying
after some comments on IRC from a highly opinionated australian who
wishes to remain anonymous.