> Or the re module should be *replaced* by the code from the regex module
> (but renamed to re, and with certain backwards compatibilities
> restored, probably).

This is what I meant.

> But I really hope the re module (really: the _sre extension module)
> can be fixed.

Start fixing these issues from scratch doesn't make much sense IMHO.  We could "extract" the fixes from regex and merge them in re, but then again it's probably easier to just replace the whole module.

> We should also make a habit in our docs of citing specific versions
> of the Unicode standard, and specific TR numbers and versions where 
> they apply.

While this is a good thing it's not always doable.  Usually someone reports a bug related to something specified in some standard and only that part gets fixed.  Sometimes everything else is also updated to follow the whole standard, but often this happens incrementally, so we can't say, e.g., "the re module supports Unicode x.y" unless we go through the whole standard and fix/implements everything.