useful documentation on the Scrap Manager.

doesn't know how to do LE, LT, GE, GT.  dict_richcompare can't do the
latter any faster than dict_compare can.  More importantly, for
cmp(dict1, dict2), Python *first* tries rich compares with EQ, LT, and
GT one at a time, even if the tp_compare slot is defined, and
dict_richcompare called dict_compare for the latter two because
it couldn't do them itself.  The result was a lot of wasted calls to
dict_compare.  Now dict_richcompare gives up at once the times Python
calls it with LT and GT from try_rich_to_3way_compare(), and dict_compare
is called only once (when Python gets around to trying the tp_compare
slot).
Continued mystery:  despite that this cut the number of calls to
dict_compare approximately in half in test_mutants.py, the latter still
runs amazingly slowly.  Running under the debugger doesn't show excessive
activity in the dict comparison code anymore, so I'm guessing the culprit
is somewhere else -- but where?  Perhaps in the element (key/value)
comparison code?  We clearly spend a lot of time figuring out how to
compare things.

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.

and wrap the body in try/finally to ensure TESTFN gets cleaned up no
matter what.

This closes SF bug #423087.

both weakref.Weak*Dictionary classes.

This closes SF bug #416480.

module for useful constants.

(The string "strop" is found in the rexec documentation, but that should
not be changed until strop is actually removed or rexec no longer allows
it.)

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.

*not* define O_RDWR; get that from the os module.

meaning infinity -- but at least warn about it in the code!  I pissed
away a couple hours on this today, and don't wish the same on the next
in line.
Bugfix candidate.

means "replace everything".  But the string module, string.replace()
amd test_string.py believe a 0 count means "replace nothing".
"Nothing" wins, strop loses.
Bugfix candidate.

out of synch than I realized, and I managed to break replace's "count"
argument when it was 0.  All is well again.  Maybe.
Bugfix candidate.

mymemXXX stuff, and they were already out of synch.  Fix the remaining
bugs in both and get them back in synch.
Bugfix release candidate.

Platform blew up on "123".replace("123", "").  Michael Hudson pinned the
blame on platform malloc(0) returning NULL.
This is a candidate for all bugfix releases.

needed now that fcntl exports the constants.

warning.  This is similar to the TERMIOS backward compatbility module.

and using the constants defined there instead of FCNTL.

This closes SF bug #231328.

Added all constants needed to use the functions defined in this module
that are not defined elsewhere (the O_* symbols are available in the
os module).  No additonal modules are needed to use this now.

    PyObject_AsFileDescriptor() -- it does the same thing everywhere, so
    use it the same way everyone else does so that exceptions are
    consistent.  This means we have less code here, and we do not need to
    resort to hackish ways of getting the Python-visible function name to
    fdconv().

Thanks to Mark Favas.

Updates zipfile.ZipFile docs to mention the fact that you can create a
ZipFile instance from an arbitrary file-like object.

This closes patch #418011.

this could cause invalid paths to be returned for AF_UNIX sockets on some
platforms (including FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE), appearantly because there is
no assurance that the address will be nul-terminated when filled in by the
kernel.

PySocketSock_recvfrom():  Use PyString_AS_STRING() to get the data pointer
    of a string we create ourselves; there is no need for the extra type
    check from PyString_AsString().

This closes SF bug #416573.

SF patch 416251 2.1c1 mmapmodule: unused vrbl cleanup

This closes SF bug #416530.

This header does not exist on all Unix flavors; FreeBSD in particular does
not include it.

This closes SF bug #422320.