*ordering* between objects; there is only a default equality test
(defined by an object being equal to itself only).  Read the comment
in object.c.  The current implementation never uses a three-way
comparison to compute a rich comparison, but it does use a rich
comparison to compute a three-way comparison.  I'm not quite done
ripping out all the calls to PyObject_Compare/Cmp, or replacing
tp_compare implementations with tp_richcompare implementations;
but much of that has happened (to make most unit tests pass).

The following tests still fail, because I need help deciding
or understanding:

test_codeop -- depends on comparing code objects
test_datetime -- need Tim Peters' opinion
test_marshal -- depends on comparing code objects
test_mutants -- need help understanding it

The problem with test_codeop and test_marshal is this: these tests
compare two different code objects and expect them to be equal.
Is that still a feature we'd like to support?  I've temporarily
removed the comparison and hash code from code objects, so they
use the default (equality by pointer only) comparison.

For the other two tests, run them to see for yourself.
(There may be more failing test with "-u all".)

A general problem with getting lots of these tests to pass is
the reality that for object types that have a natural total ordering,
implementing __cmp__ is much more convenient than implementing
__eq__, __ne__, __lt__, and so on.  Should we go back to allowing
__cmp__ to provide a total ordering?  Should we provide some other
way to implement rich comparison with a single method override?
Alex proposed a __key__() method; I've considered a __richcmp__()
method.  Or perhaps __cmp__() just shouldn't be killed off...

Delete globals which contain variable information at the end of the test.
This makes the test stable (no reported leaks) when running regrtest -R
to find reference leaks.

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.

imports e.g. test_support must do so using an absolute package name
such as "import test.test_support" or "from test import test_support".

This also updates the README in Lib/test, and gets rid of the
duplicate data dirctory in Lib/test/data (replaced by
Lib/email/test/data).

Now Tim and Jack can have at it. :)

be possible to provoke unbounded recursion now, but leaving that to someone
else to provoke and repair.
Bugfix candidate -- although this is getting harder to backstitch, and the
cases it's protecting against are mondo contrived.

converting to string.
Critical bugfix candidate -- if you take this seriously <wink>.

A Mystery:  test_mutants ran amazingly slowly even before dictobject.c
"got fixed".  I don't have a clue as to why.  dict comparison was and
remains linear-time in the size of the dicts, and test_mutants only tries
100 dict pairs, of size averaging just 50.  So "it should" run in less than
an eyeblink; but it takes at least a second on this 800MHz box.

Fixed a half dozen ways in which general dict comparison could crash
Python (even cause Win98SE to reboot) in the presence of kay and/or
value comparison routines that mutate the dict during dict comparison.
Bugfix candidate.