Remove unused and unnecessary checks for sizeof(char).

- fix some markup

closes SF bug #721157

- use_icon(): fix the check for whether a supplemental link is being
  used

test_basics.py: updated for the set_get_returns_none() default of 2 change.

(Contributed by Greg Chapman.)

Since this only changes the error message, I doubt that it should be
backported.

the header file seems to be hand-written and missing the "const" keywords
for input parameters passed by reference.

as "This is the same format as used by gl.lrectwrite() and the imgfile
module."  This implies a certain byte order in multi-byte pixel
formats.  However, the code was originally written on an SGI
(big-endian) and *uses* the fact that bytes are stored in a particular
order in ints.  This means that the code uses and produces different
byte order on little-endian systems.

This fix adds a module-level flag "backward_compatible" (default not
set, and if not set, behaves as if set to 1--i.e. backward compatible)
that can be used on a little-endian system to use the same byte order
as the SGI.  Using this flag it is then possible to prepare
SGI-compatible images on a little-endian system.

This patch is the result of a (small) discussion on python-dev and was
submitted to SourceForge as patch #874358.

strong crypto.

(Contributed by Dmitry Vasiliev.)

  timeit, base64, MSVC++ 7.1 build, METH_COEXISTS, and optimizations.

* Put in a comment suggesting an improvement to the rsplit() example.

separaters on str.split() and str.rsplit().

factory functions, so you can call quicktime functions that are implemented
as methods on NULL too.

Still don't allow quicktime functions to return NULL pointers, though: I
think this always signals an error condition.

failure on FreeBSD.

Formerly, the length was only fetched from sequence objects.
Now, any object that reports its length can benefit from pre-sizing.

Formerly, the length was only fetched from sequence objects.
Now, any object that reports its length can benefit from pre-sizing.

Formerly, length data fetched from sequence objects.
Now, any object that reports its length can benefit from pre-sizing.

On one sample timing, it gave a threefold speedup for list(s) where s
was a set object.

Make timings more consistent by temporarily disabling GC.