the 2005 Summer of Code).

The revision adds a number of new mailbox classes that support adding
and removing messages; these classes also support mailbox locking and
default to using email.Message instead of rfc822.Message.

The old mailbox classes are largely left alone for backward compatibility.
The exception is the Maildir class, which was present in the old module
and now inherits from the new classes.  The Maildir class's interface
is pretty simple, though, so I think it'll be compatible with existing
code.

(The change to the NEWS file also adds a missing word to a different
news item, which unfortunately required rewrapping the line.)

compatibility classes in the new mailbox.py that I'll be committing in
a few minutes.

One change has been made: the tests use len(mbox) instead of len(mbox.boxes).
The 'boxes' attribute was never documented and contains some internal state
that seems unlikely to have been useful.

Python 2.4 changed ntpath.abspath to do an import
inside the function.  As a result, due to Python's
import lock, anything calling abspath on Windows
(directly, or indirectly like tempfile.TemporaryFile)
hung when it was called from a thread spawned as a
side effect of importing a module.

This is a depressingly frequent problem, and
deserves a more general fix.  I'm settling for
a micro-fix here because this specific one accounts
for a report of Zope Corp's ZEO hanging on Windows,
and it was an odd way to change abspath to begin
with (ntpath needs a different implementation
depending on whether we're actually running on
Windows, and the _obvious_ way to arrange for that
is not to bury a possibly-failing import _inside_
the function).

Note that if/when other micro-fixes of this kind
get made, the new Lib/test/threaded_import_hangers.py
is a convenient place to add tests for them.

I think that 'generic operating system services' is the best category.
Note that the Doc/lib/libctypes.latex file is generated from reST sources.
You are welcome to make typo fixes, and I'll try to keep the reST sources
in sync, but markup changes would be lost - they should be fixed in the tool
that creates the latex file.
The conversion script is external/ctypes/docs/manual/mkpydoc.py.

Add empty __init__ methods for stateful multibytecodec instances.
This resolves a problem found by Thomas Wouters:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-April/064051.html

This generated a ugly code, "P>".

string, because of a cast to int.

__delitem__, __setslice__ and __delslice__ hooks. This caused test_weakref
and test_userlist to fail in the p3yk branch (where UserList, like all
classes, is new-style) on amd64 systems, with open-ended slices: the
sys.maxint value for empty-endpoint was transformed into -1.

Barry approved it awhile ago.  Been sitting in my sandbox for awhile as
well.

- tp_new (which was apparently always overridden:-) called base class
  tp_init in stead of tp_new.

Add some items; add "New module" consistently; make contextlib.closing example more interesting and more correct (thanks Gustavo!); add a name

I tested this with valgrind on amd64.

The man pages I found for diff architectures are inconsistent on this.
I'm not entirely sure this change is correct for all architectures either.

Perhaps we should just over-allocate and not worry about it?