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Reopened - this patch looks chaotic, but I think all pieces
are actually there. 

Feedback:

General: it would have been better to submit separate
patches for each feature. I also wish you would upload a
fixed patch rather than include patches in comments.

PyError_RaiseArgs - This doesn't differ enough from
PyErr_SetObject, if it differs at all -- it just
instantiates the exception earlier. I don't think that the
PyErr_Raise* API provides sufficient added benefits to
warrant deprecating the old calls. Also, it's a *feature*
that the exception isn't instantiated right away -- this
saves time when it is caught and thrown away in C code
later, as often happens.

PyError_Raise - this may be useful, we're just considering
something like this.

PyErr_SetPythonPath, Py_GetPythonPath - why can't you just
use setenv()?

Py_Set/GetOptimizeLevel - IMO these are not needed, you can
just set the global variable Py_OptimizeFlag yourself.