one of the test locales cannot be set.

locale changed but not used during the function call it was recreated during.

The test in this checkin is untested (OS X does not have the proper locale
support for me to test), although the fix for the bug this deals with
was tested by the OP (#1290505).  Once the buildbots verify the test at least
doesn't fail it becomes a backport candidate.

If MSVCCompiler.initialize() was called multiple times, the path
would get duplicated.  On Windows, this is a problem because the
path is limited to 4k.  There's no benefit in adding a path multiple
times, so prevent that from occuring.  We also normalize the path
before checking for duplicates so things like /a and /a/ won't both
be stored.

Will backport.

returned by python-config if Python was built with --enable-shared
because that prevented the shared library from being used.

the 2.5.0 release.

instantiating the class. Docs and tests are updated.

test_telnetlib.py with a basic test and timeout ones.
Docs are also updated.

the C lib's clock() is used, but it must be divided by CLOCKS_PER_SEC
as for the POSIX implementation (thanks to #pypy).

Consolidate patches #1690164, 1683397, and 1690169, all of which refactor XML-related test suites. The patches are applied together because they use a common output/xmltests file.
Thanks to Jerry Seutter for all three patches.

the test_smtplib.py file, with a basic test and the timeout
ones. Docs are updated too.

socket.recvfrom, which caused an ugly crash.

test_poplib.py file with a basic test and the timeout
ones. Docs are also updated.

the ftplib tests.

file to test the ftp lib (right now I included a basic test, the timeout
one, and nothing else).

for threading and socket serving.

regression tests.