for generating the configure script.

Original idea by Martin von Löwis.

without format arguments.

mangling the array declarations in it.

to ensure they don't get mangled.

This will be helpful to people who want to compile Python with a
cross-compiler. Now you can upload the configure script on your host
machine, run it with caching enabled, and download the cached results
on your build machine.

This is mostly an aesthetic change.

across different machine architectures and compatibility with Python 3.x.

issues mentioned in #3410.

Prepare for Windows 7 (still commented out).

command helper functions.

See #6479 for some motivation.

Since there is no official mapping file from unicode.org,
the codec file is generated on Windows with the new genwincodec.py script.

This should allow direct compilation from a downloaded source tar ball.