Reviewed by Fredrik Lundh and Skip Montanaro.

Backport from trunk.

 - Issue #3678: Correctly pass LDFLAGS and LDLAST to the linker on shared
   library targets in the Makefile.

Reviewed by Benjamin Peterson.

 - Issue #1204: The configure script now tests for additional libraries
   that may be required when linking against readline.  This fixes issues
   with x86_64 builds on some platforms (a few Linux flavors and OpenBSD).

the fix for issue 874900 to fix the use of the threading module in a
post-fork python process.  A NEWS entry for this already exists with
the previous Lib/threading commit for this bug.

Reviewed Amaury Forgeot d'Arc (Backport of r66213)

a unicode argument.

Backport of r66119

 issue3715: docstring representation of hex escaped string needs to be double
 escaped.

Backport from trunk r65971.

Also fixes rgbimg module (just before it is removed from 2.6).

pythonapi calling convention so that the GIL is held and error return
values are checked.

Be less strict when parsing these version numbers,
they don't necessarily follow the python numbering scheme.

Backport of r65834

Fixes Issue #3309: Fix bz2.BZFile iterator to release its internal lock
properly when raising an exception due to the bz2file being closed.
Prevents a deadlock.

Fixes Issue #874900: after an os.fork() call the threading module state is cleaned
up in the child process to prevent deadlock and report proper thread counts
if the new process uses the threading module.

os.rename() fails unicode conversion on 2nd parameter. (windows only)

- PC/VC6/_bsddb.dsp:
    removed '/nodefaultlib:"msvcrt"' to fix linker error.

- PC/VC6/_msi.dsp:
    added new module support.

- PC/VC6/_sqlite3.dsp:
    /D "MODULE_NAME=\"sqlite3\""
    caused extra leading space like
    #define MODULE_NAME " sqlite3"
    so uses
    /D MODULE_NAME=\"sqlite3\"
    instead.

- PC/VC6/python.dsp:
    changed stack size to 2MB to avoid stack overflow on
    some tests.

(backport from r65609)

(backport from r65644)

  object was stored in the freelist. (backport from r65637.)

menu entries were not deleted.

Backport from trunk r65622.

Issue #2113: Fix error in subprocess.Popen if the select system call is
interrupted by a signal.

Issue #1471: Arguments to fcntl.ioctl are no longer broken on 64-bit OpenBSD
and similar platforms due to sign extension.

Issue #3120: On 64-bit Windows the subprocess module was truncating handles.

- Issue #1857: subprocess.Popen.poll gained an additional _deadstate keyword
  argument in python 2.5, this broke code that subclassed Popen to include its
  own poll method.  Fixed my moving _deadstate to an _internal_poll method.

Tcl command objects.
Backport of r65399.