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tjreedy and arigo's comments have been taken into
consideration.  An updated patch (009) has been attached. 
it uses the python >= 2.2 interface for defining methods and
member variables rather than the getattr function with
manual strcmp's.

I was unable to make digest_size and such class attributes
because the hashes are not classes.  The hashlib.md5
function for instance is a constructor function that returns
an appropriate internal HASH object.  The goal of those
constructors is to be as fast as possible; wrapping them
with python in order to make them actual classes would be
too slow and I did not see an obvious way to do it from C.

I believe this patch is ready to commit.  Further
improvements or refinements can be made to it in CVS.

the documentation in html for easy viewing has been updated at

http://electricrain.com/greg/hashlib-py25-doc/