I have reasons (unfortunately under NDA -- I hope I'll be able to talk about it soone) for wanting to have a very stable 2.3 out by August 1st. Experiments with _sre are incompatible with this goal. I'm trying to get resources to release 2.3b2 on June 30. Who can help? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)