`struct` module changes).

In rare cases of strings specifying true values near sys.maxint,
and oddball bases (not decimal or a power of 2), int(string, base)
could deliver insane answers.  This repairs all such problems, and
also speeds string->int significantly.  On my box, here are %
speedups for decimal strings of various lengths:

length speedup
------ -------
 1       12.4%
 2       15.7%
 3       20.6%
 4       28.1%
 5       33.2%
 6       37.5%
 7       41.9%
 8       46.3%
 9       51.2%
10       19.5%
11       19.9%
12       23.9%
13       23.7%
14       23.3%
15       24.9%
16       25.3%
17       28.3%
18       27.9%
19       35.7%

Note that the difference between 9 and 10 is the difference between
short and long Python ints on a 32-bit box.  The patch doesn't
actually do anything to speed conversion to long:  the speedup is
due to detecting "unsigned long" overflow more quickly.

This is a bugfix candidate, but it's a non-trivial patch and it
would be painful to separate the "bug fix" from the "speed up" parts.

speed up splitlines and strip with charsets; etc.  rsplit is now as
fast as split in all our tests (reverse takes no time at all), and
splitlines() is nearly as fast as a plain split("\n") in our tests.
and we're not done yet... ;-)

at http://zestyping.livejournal.com/193260.html that 'erformance' really means
something more general.

This patchs makes it possible to create a universal build on OSX 10.4 and use
the result to build extensions on 10.3. It also makes it possible to override
the '-arch' and '-isysroot' compiler arguments for specific extensions.

#1487105.

"base" parameter.

Applied patch zombie-frames-2.diff from sf patch 876206 with updates for
Python 2.5 and also modified to retain the free_list to avoid the 67%
slow-down in pybench recursion test. 5% speed up in function call pybench.

approach as find/index

since that's what it should be.

compiler warnings on Windows (signed vs unsigned mismatch
in comparisons).  Cleaned that up by switching more locals
to Py_ssize_t.  Simplified overflow checking (it can _be_
simpler because while these things are declared as
Py_ssize_t, then should in fact never be negative).

for long repeats.

total number of occurences

Revert gzip readline performance patch #1281707 until a more generic performance improvement can be found

Michael Hudson's nice gimmicks for IEEE special
values (infinities, NaNs) don't work.