acquiring the import lock around fork() calls. This prevents other threads
from having that lock while the fork happens, and is the recommended way of
dealing with such issues. There are two other locks we care about, the GIL
and the Thread Local Storage lock. The GIL is obviously held when calling
Python functions like os.fork(), and the TLS lock is explicitly reallocated
instead, while also deleting now-orphaned TLS data.

This only fixes calls to os.fork(), not extension modules or embedding
programs calling C's fork() directly. Solving that requires a new set of API
functions, and possibly a rewrite of the Python/thread_*.c mess. Add a
warning explaining the problem to the documentation in the mean time.

This also changes behaviour a little on AIX. Before, AIX (but only AIX) was
getting the import lock reallocated, seemingly to avoid this very same
problem. This is not the right approach, because the import lock is a
re-entrant one, and reallocating would do the wrong thing when forking while
holding the import lock.

Will backport to 2.6, minus the tiny AIX behaviour change.

PyImport_AppendInittab() to take a const char *.

Added a new API function PyImport_ImportModuleNoBlock. It solves the problem with dead locks when mixing threads and imports

 - IMPORT_NAME takes an extra argument from the stack: the relativeness of
   the import. Only passed to __import__ when it's not -1.

 - __import__() takes an optional 5th argument for the same thing; it
   __defaults to -1 (old semantics: try relative, then absolute)

 - 'from . import name' imports name (be it module or regular attribute)
   from the current module's *package*. Likewise, 'from .module import name'
   will import name from a sibling to the current module.

 - Importing from outside a package is not allowed; 'from . import sys' in a
   toplevel module will not work, nor will 'from .. import sys' in a
   (single-level) package.

 - 'from __future__ import absolute_import' will turn on the new semantics
   for import and from-import: imports will be absolute, except for
   from-import with dots.

Includes tests for regular imports and importhooks, parser changes and a
NEWS item, but no compiler-package changes or documentation changes.

In C++, it's an error to pass a string literal to a char* function
without a const_cast().  Rather than require every C++ extension
module to put a cast around string literals, fix the API to state the
const-ness.

I focused on parts of the API where people usually pass literals:
PyArg_ParseTuple() and friends, Py_BuildValue(), PyMethodDef, the type
slots, etc.  Predictably, there were a large set of functions that
needed to be fixed as a result of these changes.  The most pervasive
change was to make the keyword args list passed to
PyArg_ParseTupleAndKewords() to be a const char *kwlist[].

One cast was required as a result of the changes:  A type object
mallocs the memory for its tp_doc slot and later frees it.
PyTypeObject says that tp_doc is const char *; but if the type was
created by type_new(), we know it is safe to cast to char *.

  with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289).  This also closes SF
  bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).

(Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)

also adds 'extern' to PyAPI_DATA rather than at each declaration, as
discussed with Tim and Guido.