While this may happen in principle, and out of curiosity: Was this a problem in 2.2b1 also? Looking at the changes made on the 2.2b1 release branch, I see that a total of 7 files was changed. Except for patchlevel.h, and the \n\ fix on socketmodule.c, there were no changes to C code.
What's more common is actually a flurry of checkins just *before* the release branch is made (say in the last two days). These often include a somewhat hasty commit of a project that's valuable to have but introduces new bugs -- either Mac-specific or generic. The patch that introduced the missing \n\ problem was an example of this.
And, more serious, there's another example for the 2.2b1 release that I found just friday (so this bug is going to stay in MacPython 2.2b1, I'm afraid): importing packages from frozen programs is broken. There was a moderately simple fix to import.c, to test that submodules of frozen modules were also frozen, and not picked up from the filesystem. Unfortunately whoever did the patch wasn't aware that MacPython frozen modules work different, and hence broke it. -- Jack Jansen | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++ Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig ++++ www.cwi.nl/~jack | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm