The second (#9396) came up in the context of the new cache decorators added to functools, and allowing applications to choose their own caching strategies. I suggested exposing the original (uncached) function, and Raymond suggested that the easiest way to enable that would be for functools.update_wrapper to add a new attribute that provides a reference to the original function.
I moved this feature request to its own bug after brief IRC discussion with RDM: http://bugs.python.org/issue9567 The idea was to separate concerns and eventually get feedback from people reading new-bugs-announce, but your email actually does that :) I say “add attribute to partial objects” in the bug title since I don’t know if it’s feasible in wraps only; while update_wrapper is simple Python code, wraps merely delegates to _functools.partial, so please change the title (and maybe add easy keyword) if appropriate. Regards