I have the email trail to prove that George Neville-Neil approved this.
(Backport of r62097.)

Test is run with "regrtest.py -R:: test_compile"

Backport of r62015

"" "" becomes """", which is invalid code.

Backport of r61979.

is stored as a str instance rather than a unicode instance.
Backported from Python 2.6 (see r61904).

explicitly supplied.

Corrected the raw-unicode-escape codec to use UTF-16 surrogates in
this case, like the unicode-escape codec does.

Backport of r61793 and r61853

advertised in the docs.
 (backport from r61712)

and **kwargs expressions could give bogus error messages.

 Fix chown on 64-bit linux.  It needed to take a long (64-bit on 64bit linux) as
 uid and gid input to accept values >=2**31 as valid while still accepting
 negative numbers to pass -1 to chown for "no change".

 Fixes issue1747858.

The behaviour of winsound.Beep() seems to differ between different versions of Windows when there's either:
    a) no sound card entirely
    b) legacy beep driver has been disabled
    c) the legacy beep driver has been uninstalled
Sometimes RuntimeErrors are raised, sometimes they're not.  If _have_soundcard() returns False, don't expect winsound.Beep() to raise a RuntimeError, as this clearly isn't the case, as demonstrated by the various Win32 XP buildbots.

Issue 2321: reduce memory usage (increase the memory that is returned
to the system) by using pymalloc for the data of unicode objects.

(Exploit at request.)

 (backport from r61275)

#1725737: ignore other VC directories other than CVS and SVN's too.

permission to create files in the root directory.

The 2.6 version also converts to unittest, but it seems to work fine under 2.5.

Fix by Malte Helmert