Backport of r67266

Backport r66804: #1415508 from Rocky Bernstein: add docstrings for enable_interspersed_args(), disable_interspersed_args()

and then remove it. Written by Guilherme Polo (gpolo). Backport of r67082.

does not return an iterator for the 4th and 5th items.
(sequence-like and mapping-like state)

Backport of r67049.

snv rev 59943 and 59946.

module.

garbage collection of a Profiler object.

For example:
   "".count("xxxx", sys.maxint, 0)

Backport of r66631.

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.