I like this because it makes the code shorter! :-)

Once Barry and the email-sig have a working new version
we'll add it back.
If it doesn't make the 3.0a deadline (release August 31), too bad.

Completely get rid of StringIO.py and cStringIO.c.

I had to fix a few tests and modules beyond what Christian did, and
invent a few conventions.  E.g. in elementtree, I chose to
write/return Unicode strings whe no encoding is given, but bytes when
an explicit encoding is given.  Also mimetools was made to always
assume binary files.

There's one major and one minor category still unfixed:
doctests are the major category (and I hope to be able to augment the
refactoring tool to refactor bona fide doctests soon);
other code generating print statements in strings is the minor category.

(Oh, and I don't know if the compiler package works.)

number of tests, all because of the codecs/_multibytecodecs issue described
here (it's not a Py3K issue, just something Py3K discovers):
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-April/064051.html

Hye-Shik Chang promised to look for a fix, so no need to fix it here. The
tests that are expected to break are:

test_codecencodings_cn
test_codecencodings_hk
test_codecencodings_jp
test_codecencodings_kr
test_codecencodings_tw
test_codecs
test_multibytecodec

This merge fixes an actual test failure (test_weakref) in this branch,
though, so I believe merging is the right thing to do anyway.

Briefly (from the NEWS file):

- Updates for the email package:
  + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
    _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
    Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
  + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
    Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
    the Parser constructor.  These will be removed in email 3.1.
  + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
  + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
  + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
    added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
  + Updates to documentation.

need the _compat21 or _compat22 modules either.

to print>> the structure to.  Defaults to sys.stdout.

type with get_type().

to make public, but that others might still find useful.

for the email package.  The former is now just a shell project that
has some extra files for packaging for independent use (e.g. setup.py
and README).

Added a compatibility layer so that the same API can be used in Python
2.1 and 2.2/2.3 with the major differences shuffled off into helper
modules (_compat21.py and _compat22.py).

Also bumped the package version number to 2.0.3 for some fixes to be
checked in momentarily.

non-us-ascii character sets in headers and bodies.  Some API changes
(with DeprecationWarnings for the old APIs).  Better RFC-compliant
implementations of base64 and quoted-printable.

Updated test cases.  Documentation updates to follow (after I finish
writing them ;).

failobj, and when getting the subtype use 'plain' as the failobj.
text/plain is supposed to be the default if the message contains no
Content-Type: header.

typed_subpart_iterator(): Arguments major renamed to maintype and
    minor renamed to subtype for consistency with the rest of the
    package.

<http://sf.net/projects/mimelib>.  There /are/ API differences between
mimelib and email, but most of the implementations are shared (except
where cool Py2.2 stuff like generators are used).