Is there really no other way to read the umask than to set it?

Hope this works on Windows...

described, and add a test for it.

2.5 bugfix candidate, maybe; arguably this patch changes the API of
dumbdbm and shouldn't be added in a point-release.

[Bug #1172763] dumbdbm uses eval() on lines, so it chokes if there's an extra \r on the end of a line; fixed by stripping off trailing whitespace.

database corruption problems with Spambayes.

closing idempotent (it used to raise a nuisance exception on the 2nd
close attempt).

Bugfix candidate?  Probably, but arguable.

Related to SF patch 723231 (which pointed out the problem, but didn't
fix it, just shut up the warning msg -- which was pointing out a dead-
serious bug!).

Bugfix candidate.

databases are associated with corruption problems, so I studied this code
carefully and ran some brutal stress tests.  I didn't find any bugs,
although it's unclear whether this code *intends* that __setitem__ can
leave the directory file out of synch with the data file (so
if a dumbdbm isn't properly closed, and the value of an existing key
was ever replaced, corruption is almost certain, where "corruption"
means the directory file is out of synch with the data file).

Added many comments and generally modernized the code.  Examples of the
latter:  we have better ways of reading a whole file line-by-line now;
eval() now tolerates a trailing newline; the %r format code can be used
to avoid explicit repr/backtick calls; and the code often broke tuples
into their components when it was clearer and faster to just leave them
as tuples.

When shelve and the bsdbm where expanded to a full mapping interface,
this module was missed.

Patch 560023 adding docstrings.  2.2 Candidate (after verifying modules were not updated after 2.2).

  Make dumbdbm merely "dumb", rather than "terminally broken". Without this
  patch, it's almost impossible to use dumbdbm _without_ causing horrible
  datalossage. With this patch, dumbdbm passes my own horrible torture test,
  as well as the roundup test suite.

  dumbdbm really could do with a smidgin of a rewrite or two, but that's not
  suitable for the release21-maint branch.

especially since the documentation described it in detail.
This partially closes SF bug #490098.

mostly changes of / operators into //.  Once or twice I did more or
less than recommended.

dumbdbm archive created on Windows can be read on Unix.

  There is a silly bug in the fall-back dumbdbm.py database package in
  the Python 1.5.2 standard distro. This bug causes any changes to an
  existing item to generate a new key, even when the key already
  exists.  After many updates, the .dir file used by dumbdbm grows to
  a huge size, and can cause filesystem problems.

platforms where tell() returns a long.  (Perhaps tell() should be
fixed too?)  Reported by Greg Humphreys.

pickle.py: new low-level persistency module (used to be called flatten)
dbmac.py: stupid dbm clone for the Mac
anydbm.py: generic dbm interface (should be extended to support gdbm)