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?

case.  I've yet to figure out how to provoke a None return I can test.

was having funny effects when called on >2Gb strings ;P

zfill stringmethods, so they can create strings larger than 2Gb on 64bit
systems (even win64.) The unicode versions of these methods already did this
right.

Write datetime.strptime() item; show use of @contextmanager in defining __context__ methods; minor edits; add two names

abstract namespace that is now fully supported.