Just looking at the indicated file in the 2.6.4 release tarball, it does 
not seem that it would apply cleanly.  The line numbers do not apply 
properly anymore, though the edited lines themselves still appear to be 
unaffected.  Without context diff in the original patch, it's difficult 
for me to asseess exactly which lines should be the affected ones.

Unfortunately, I'm not in a position right now with my job to spend the 
time necessary to produce this as a patch since I'm on a timescale that 
requires equivalent functionality by Wednesday on production systems.  
Modifying it to apply cleanly to the latest versions of Python appears 
like it would be easy, if the internals of that file have not changed 
drastically in structure since 2.6.4.

Documentation should be relatively straightforward as well, since the 
functionality the patch introduces is rather transparent.  Unit tests 
are beyond my expertise to comment on.

Would have loved to have seen this in the 2.7/3.1 series, as it would 
make my task much easier!  I'll keep it in mind for my "off time" this 
holiday weekend.