was used unmotivated in the pow() docs)

as diagnosed by Nick Coghlan.

test_capi.py:  A test module should never spawn a thread as
a side effect of being imported.  Because this one did, the
segfault one of its thread tests caused didn't occur until
a few tests after test_regrtest.py thought test_capi was
finished.  Repair that.  Also join() the thread spawned
at the end, so that test_capi is truly finished when
regrtest reports that it's done.

_testcapimodule.c test_thread_state():  this spawns a
couple of non-threading.py threads, passing them a PyObject*
argument, but did nothing to ensure that those threads
finished before returning.  As a result, the PyObject*
_could_ (although this was unlikely) get decref'ed out of
existence before the threads got around to using it.
Added explicit synchronization (via a Python mutex) so
that test_thread_state can reliably wait for its spawned
threads to finish.

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=532156&aid=1453037&group_id=71702

Including unittest.

more consistent (and smaller by 85 lines or so).

Make some functions static, reformat function decl to be consistent and check for error from PyModule_GetDict()

This was a fair amount of rework of the patch.  Refactored test_fork1 so it
could be reused by the new tests for wait3/4.  Also made them into new style
unittests (derive from unittest.TestCase).

expand tabs.

 This patch adds a-LAW encoding to audioop and replaces the old
u-LAW encoding/decoding code with the current code from sox.

Possible issues: the code from sox uses int16_t.

Code by Lars Immisch

returns a non-string when converting %Z.

Will backport.

This will hopefully get rid of some Coverity warnings, be a hint to
developers, and be marginally faster.

Some asserts were added when the type is currently known, but depends
on values from another function.

kills GUI.  Report from B. Sherwood.  Backport to 2.3.4.