An implementation of the AutoThreadState API, mainly
for discussion purposes at this point.  To be a PEP soon.

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Attaching a new patch that works perfectly.  2 checks remain
in the code that will be debug only, but apart from that, it
is pretty good.  No changes at all to existing semantics.
Tested on Linux and Windows.

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It appears to me that PyAutoThreadState_Release calls
PyThreadState_Clear after releasing the GIL (if the thread
state was created by PyAutoThreadState_Ensure, then old
state will be UNLOCKED, so PyEval_ReleaseThread will be
called).  It looks to me that, if the thread state is going to be
deleted, the call to Clear it should be moved up to just before
ReleaseThread, i.e.:
if (oldstate == PyAutoThreadState_UNLOCKED) {
    if (tcur->autothreadstate_counter == 1)
        PyThreadState_Clear(tcur);
    PyEval_ReleaseThread(tcur);
}

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Attaching a new patch.  This corrects the clearing of the
threadstate, and uses the new names PyGILState_*.

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Checking in Include/pystate.h;
new revision: 2.24; previous revision: 2.23
Checking in Include/pythread.h;
new revision: 2.21; previous revision: 2.20
Checking in Lib/test/test_capi.py;
new revision: 1.5; previous revision: 1.4
Checking in Modules/_testcapimodule.c;
new revision: 1.22; previous revision: 1.21
Checking in Modules/posixmodule.c;
new revision: 2.295; previous revision: 2.294
Checking in Python/ceval.c;
new revision: 2.359; previous revision: 2.358
Checking in Python/pystate.c;
new revision: 2.26; previous revision: 2.25
Checking in Python/pythonrun.c;
new revision: 2.191; previous revision: 2.190
Checking in Python/thread.c;
new revision: 2.46; previous revision: 2.45
Checking in Python/thread_sgi.h;
new revision: 2.17; previous revision: 2.16