Clarify the role of the chars argument in the strip() methods.

[ 1181301 ] make float packing copy bytes when they can

which hasn't been reviewed, despite numerous threats to check it in
anyway if noone reviews it.  Please read the diff on the checkin list,
at least!

The basic idea is to examine the bytes of some 'probe values' to see if
the current platform is a IEEE 754-ish platform, and if so
_PyFloat_{Pack,Unpack}{4,8} just copy bytes around.

The rest is hair for testing, and tests.

Is anyone running the test suite regularly at the moment?

[ 1207501 ] Issue in grammar

We didn't define dotted_name in the pseudo-grammar in the reference
docs.  Backport candidate.

(closes SF bug #1120777)

(closes SF bug #1167922)

278. Closes bug 967182.

A problem regarding importing symlinked modules was recently reported on the
Cygwin mailing list:

    http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-04/msg00257.html

The following test case demonstrates the problem:

$ ls -l
total 1
lrwxrwxrwx    1 jt       None            6 Apr 23 13:32 bar.py -> foo.py
-rw-r--r--    1 jt       None           24 Apr 18 20:13 foo.py

$ python -c 'import bar'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in ?
ImportError: No module named bar

Since Cygwin's case_ok() uses a modified version of the Windows's version, the
symlinked bar module actually resolves to file foo.py instead of bar.py. This
obviously causes the matching code to fail (regardless of case).

The patch fixes this problem by making Cygwin use the Mac OS X case_ok()
instead of a modified Window's version.

crashing, and indirectly on the fact that hash codes in
random.randrange(1000000000) were very unlikely to exhibit collisions.
To see the problem, replace this number with 500 and observe the crash on
either del target[key] or del keys[i].

The fix prevents recursive mutation, just as in the key insertion case.

(Contributed by Barry Warsaw and Matt Messier.)

into the docs and segregate the method descriptions for the various classes
into separate sections.  Base on suggestion by Paul Rubin in c.l.py.

M NEWS.txt
M PyShell.py
M rpc.py

loop.  Patch # 1190163 Michiel de Hoon

(spotted by reading pypy-svn :)

quote ended it.

Closes bug #1192777.  Thanks Christopher Smith.

* Fixed incorrect wording:  expression->exception
* Noted the specific exception reported by "raise" when the is nothing
  to re-raise.
* Eliminated several instances of "e.g." as recommended in the style guide.

[ python-Bugs-1190599 ] dir() docs show incorrect output

though not entirely how it's suggested in the bug report.

conversion using the proper magic slot (e.g., __int__()).  Also move conversion
code out of PyNumber_*() functions in the C API into the nb_* function.

Applied patch #1109424.  Thanks Walter Doewald.

defined in the makefile. Get CFLAGS from the Makefile, instead of
getting OPT, BASE_CFLAGS and EXTRA_CFLAGS individually.

to be used for flags that change binary compatibility.

Distutils was tweaked to also use the variable if used during compilation of
the interpreter.