Amaury's ideas works great. Should we build the Python core with WINVER=0x0500 and _WIN32_WINNT=0x0500, too?

is now simpler.  Thanks Mark Dickinson.

I had to modify Brett's patch slightly.

pointer copy and object increment in one pass.  For small lists,
save the overhead of the call to memcpy() -- this comes up in
calls like f(*listcomp).

The detection now works on Unix with Makefile, Makefile with VPATH and on Windows.

Thanks to Ian Bruntlett and Robert Lehmann.

I added also the feature that a @prop.getter decorator does not overwrite the doc string of the property if it was given as an argument to property().

run it and check in the resulting configure file.

Fix bug 1604. deque.__init__() did not clear existing contents like list.__init__. Not a backport candidate.