Merging the py3k-pep3137 branch back into the py3k branch.
No detailed change log; just check out the change log for the py3k-pep3137
branch.  The most obvious changes:

  - str8 renamed to bytes (PyString at the C level);
  - bytes renamed to buffer (PyBytes at the C level);
  - PyString and PyUnicode are no longer compatible.

I.e. we now have an immutable bytes type and a mutable bytes type.

The behavior of PyString was modified quite a bit, to make it more
bytes-like.  Some changes are still on the to-do list.
diff --git a/Lib/encodings/idna.py b/Lib/encodings/idna.py
index b81e5fa..30f507a 100644
--- a/Lib/encodings/idna.py
+++ b/Lib/encodings/idna.py
@@ -151,9 +151,9 @@
             raise UnicodeError("unsupported error handling "+errors)
 
         if not input:
-            return b"", 0
+            return b'', 0
 
-        result = b""
+        result = buffer()
         labels = dots.split(input)
         if labels and not labels[-1]:
             trailing_dot = b'.'
@@ -165,7 +165,7 @@
                 # Join with U+002E
                 result.extend(b'.')
             result.extend(ToASCII(label))
-        return result+trailing_dot, len(input)
+        return bytes(result+trailing_dot), len(input)
 
     def decode(self, input, errors='strict'):
 
@@ -216,7 +216,7 @@
                 if labels:
                     trailing_dot = b'.'
 
-        result = b""
+        result = buffer()
         size = 0
         for label in labels:
             if size:
@@ -228,7 +228,7 @@
 
         result += trailing_dot
         size += len(trailing_dot)
-        return (result, size)
+        return (bytes(result), size)
 
 class IncrementalDecoder(codecs.BufferedIncrementalDecoder):
     def _buffer_decode(self, input, errors, final):