I've spend some time to automate more steps of the build process. Now bzip2, bsddb, sqlite and openssl are automatically build by prelink steps.
I had to use some tricks to build openssl for 32 and 64bit CPUs in two separate build dirs.

as they didn't actually work.

Removed ReleaseAMD64 and replaced it with platform x64. The x64 builds fine except of the modules that depend on external libraries like tkinter and openssl. And I can't test the build on my 32bit CPU.

I'm using the xxmodule and xxsubtype to test the msvccompiler on Windows. I'm having trouble to compile the module with VS 2008 cl.exe because "initializer is not a constant".

svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/trunk

I've tried to fix test_cmd_line_script but I wasn't able to get all tests
right. Nick, can you please have a look?

........
  r59020 | facundo.batista | 2007-11-16 19:04:14 +0100 (Fri, 16 Nov 2007) | 12 lines


  Now in find, rfind, index, and rindex, you can use None as defaults,
  as usual with slicing (both with str and unicode strings).  This
  fixes issue 1259.

  For str only the stringobject.c file was modified.  But for unicode,
  I needed to repeat in the four functions a lot of code, so created
  a new function that does part of the job for them (and placed it in
  find.h, following a suggestion of Barry).

  Also added tests for this behaviour.
........
  r59021 | facundo.batista | 2007-11-16 19:41:24 +0100 (Fri, 16 Nov 2007) | 4 lines


  Fix for stupid error (I need to remember to do a full 'make clean + make'
  cycle before the tests...). Sorry.
........
  r59022 | facundo.batista | 2007-11-16 20:16:15 +0100 (Fri, 16 Nov 2007) | 3 lines


  Made _ParseTupleFinds only defined to unicodeobject.c
........
  r59024 | raymond.hettinger | 2007-11-17 02:51:22 +0100 (Sat, 17 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  Fix signature in example
........
  r59033 | brett.cannon | 2007-11-17 08:07:29 +0100 (Sat, 17 Nov 2007) | 5 lines

  Remove a confusing sentence about pth files and which directories are searched
  for them.

  Closes issue #1431.  Thanks Giambattista Bloisi for the help.
........
  r59039 | nick.coghlan | 2007-11-18 12:56:28 +0100 (Sun, 18 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  Patch #1739468: Directories and zipfiles containing __main__.py are now executable
........

Updates to the msi builder and PCbuild9 directory. msi.py can now create installers from the PCbuild9 directory with MSVCR90.dll. PCbuild and MSVCR71.dll are still the default.

Initial import of new PCbuild9 for VS 2008. It partly based on PCbuild and partly hand crafted with some idea from PCbuild8. I've recreated all the extension module projects.

The new directory needs some more love and care but it works. I'm not able to test the AMD64 build.

The new tree is heavily using the *.vcprops property sheets. Please set any global settings in the property sheets.

to ssl.py (no need to test whether we can dup any more).
Regular sockets no longer have a _base, but we still have explicit
reference counting of socket objects for the benefit of makefile();
using duplicate sockets won't work for SSLSocket.

be sure to import a fresh module by removing it from sys.modules

svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/trunk

........
  r58952 | christian.heimes | 2007-11-12 10:58:08 -0800 (Mon, 12 Nov 2007) | 6 lines

  readline module cleanup
  fixed indention to tabs
  use Py_RETURN_NONE macro
  added more error checks to on_completion_display_matches_hook

  open question: Does PyList_SetItem(l, i, o) steal a reference to o in the case of an error?
........
  r58956 | guido.van.rossum | 2007-11-12 12:06:40 -0800 (Mon, 12 Nov 2007) | 2 lines

  Add the test from issue 1704621 (the issue itself is already fixed here).
........
  r58963 | amaury.forgeotdarc | 2007-11-13 13:54:28 -0800 (Tue, 13 Nov 2007) | 23 lines

  Merge from py3k branch:
  Correction for issue1265 (pdb bug with "with" statement).

  When an unfinished generator-iterator is garbage collected, PyEval_EvalFrameEx
  is called with a GeneratorExit exception set.  This leads to funny results
  if the sys.settrace function itself makes use of generators.
  A visible effect is that the settrace function is reset to None.
  Another is that the eventual "finally" block of the generator is not called.

  It is necessary to save/restore the exception around the call to the trace
  function.

  This happens a lot with py3k: isinstance() of an ABCMeta instance runs
      def __instancecheck__(cls, instance):
          """Override for isinstance(instance, cls)."""
          return any(cls.__subclasscheck__(c)
                     for c in {instance.__class__, type(instance)})
  which lets an opened generator expression each time it returns True.

  Backport candidate, even if the case is less frequent in 2.5.
........
  r58968 | georg.brandl | 2007-11-14 05:59:09 -0800 (Wed, 14 Nov 2007) | 2 lines

  Remove dead link from random docs.
........
  r58971 | raymond.hettinger | 2007-11-14 14:56:16 -0800 (Wed, 14 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  Make __fields__ read-only.  Suggested by Issac Morland
........
  r58972 | raymond.hettinger | 2007-11-14 15:02:30 -0800 (Wed, 14 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  Add test for __fields__ being read-only
........
  r58975 | raymond.hettinger | 2007-11-14 18:44:53 -0800 (Wed, 14 Nov 2007) | 6 lines

  Accept Issac Morland's suggestion for __replace__ to allow multiple replacements
  (suprisingly, this simplifies the signature, improves clarity, and is comparably fast).
  Update the docs to reflect a previous change to the function name.
  Add an example to the docs showing how to override the default __repr__ method.
........
  r58976 | raymond.hettinger | 2007-11-14 18:55:42 -0800 (Wed, 14 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  Small improvement to the implementation of __replace__().
........
  r58977 | raymond.hettinger | 2007-11-14 18:58:20 -0800 (Wed, 14 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  Fixup example in docs.
........
  r58978 | raymond.hettinger | 2007-11-14 19:16:09 -0800 (Wed, 14 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  Example of multiple replacements.
........
  r58998 | raymond.hettinger | 2007-11-15 14:39:34 -0800 (Thu, 15 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  Add example for use cases requiring default values.
........
  r59000 | bill.janssen | 2007-11-15 15:03:03 -0800 (Thu, 15 Nov 2007) | 1 line

  add the certificate for the Python SVN repository for testing SSL
........
  r59004 | guido.van.rossum | 2007-11-15 16:24:44 -0800 (Thu, 15 Nov 2007) | 8 lines

  A patch from issue 1378 by roudkerk:

  Currently on Windows set_error() make use of a large array which maps
  socket error numbers to error messages.

  This patch removes that array and just lets PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr()
  generate the message by using the Win32 function FormatMessage().
........

docstrings conform to PEP 8 to someone else.)

Although WS2_32.dll doesn't have inet_pton the definition conflicts with ws2tcpip.h.

and utf-8, crashed when parsing a multiline string, or a line longer that 512
columns.

Seems to start compiling.

without calling PyType_Ready().

Question 1: Should the interpreter register all types with PyType_Ready()?
Many types seem to avoid it.

Question 2: To reproduce the problem, run the following code:
    def f():
        while True:
           for a in iter(range(0,1,10**20)):
              pass
    f()
And watch the memory used by the process.
How do we test this in a unittest?

#define for PyObject_Unicode in object.h.

In anticipation of the upcoming ssl patch I've added _ssl to PCbuild8. It's based on a copy of _socket.vcproj. My German version of VS 2005 alters almost every line of pcbuild.sln. Could somebody else please add _ssl.vcproj to the solution?

(I also cleared out all trailing whitespace in the C file.)

external symbol PyObject_Unicode'.

Building _ssl than hangs the build server because starting python.exe
displayes a message box that 'Python30.dll' cannot be found.

Temporary (?) solution: Look for existance of python30.dll and fail
the _ssl build when it is missing.

Tested on Windows by Christian Heimes.
I changed the code slightly, renaming decref_socketios() to
_decref_socketios(), and moving it closer to the close() method
that it calls.  Hopefully Bill can now submit his SSL port to 3.0.

Python failed to report an error when it wasn't able to open the PYTHONSTARTUP file.

On Windows _PySys_Init() could raise an uninitialized exception which leads to a seg fault.

Paths and file names from the fs should always be decoded with PyUnicode_DecodeFSDefault and not PyUnicode_FromString

print() mustn't raise an exception when sys.stdout is None.