Sorry for the dumb question, which may also suggest, that I'm 
unfortunately unable to contribute at this level (with zero knowledge 
of C and only "working" one for Python):
Where can I find the sources for tests etc. and how they are eventually 
to be submitted? Is some other account needed besides the one for 
bugs.python.org?

Anyway, the long character properties now work in the latest version 
issue2636-20090810#3.zip

In the mentioned overview 
http://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html
there is a statement for the property names: "You may omit the 
underscores or use hyphens or spaces instead." 
While I'm not sure, that it is a good thing to have that many 
variations, they should probably be handled in the same way.

Now, the whitespace (and also non ascii characters) in the property 
name seem to confuse the parser: these pass silently (don't match 
anything) and don't throw an exception like "undefined property name".

cf.

>>> regex.findall(ur"\p{Dummy Property}", u"abcDEF")
[]
>>> regex.findall(ur"\p{DümmýPrópërtý}", u"abcDEF")
[]
>>> regex.findall(ur"\p{DummyProperty}", u"abcDEF")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
  File "regex.pyc", line 195, in findall
  File "regex.pyc", line 563, in _compile
  File "regex.pyc", line 642, in _parse_pattern
  File "regex.pyc", line 654, in _parse_sequence
  File "regex.pyc", line 662, in _parse_item
  File "regex.pyc", line 787, in _parse_element
  File "regex.pyc", line 1021, in _parse_escape
  File "regex.pyc", line 1159, in _parse_property
error: undefined property name 'DummyProperty'
>>> 

vbr