brief help file for people editing Misc/NEWS

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+                                                       -*- text -*-
+
+If you edited Misc/NEWS before it was converted to ReST format skimming this
+file should help make the transition a bit easier.  For full details about
+Docutils and ReST, go to the Docutils website:
+
+    http://docutils.sourceforge.net/
+
+To process Misc/NEWS using Docutils, you'll need the latest docutils
+snapshot:
+
+    http://docutils.sf.net/docutils-snapshot.tgz
+
+David Goodger made a change to the allowable structure of internal
+references which greatly simplified initial conversion of the file.
+
+The changes required fell into the following categories:
+
+* The top-level "What's New" section headers changed to:
+
+    What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
+    =================================
+
+    *XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
+
+* Subsections are underlined with a single row of hyphens:
+
+    Type/class unification and new-style classes
+    --------------------------------------------
+
+* Places where "balanced" single quotes were used were changed to use
+  apostrophes as both the opening and closing quote (`string' -> 'string').
+
+* In a few places asterisks needed to be escaped which would otherwise have
+  been interpreted as beginning blocks of italic or bold text, e.g.:
+
+    - The type of tp_free has been changed from "void (*)(PyObject \*)"
+      to "void (*)(void \*)".
+
+  Note that only the asterisks preceded by whitespace needed to be escaped.
+
+* One instance of a word ending with an underscore needed to be quoted
+  ("PyCmp_" became "``PyCmp_``").
+
+* One table was converted to ReST form (search Misc/NEWS for "New codecs"
+  for this example).
+
+* A few places where chunks of code or indented text were displayed needed
+  to be properly introduced (preceding paragraph terminated by "::" and the
+  chunk of code or text indented w.r.t. the paragraph).  For example:
+
+    - Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail!  This has always been true,
+      but no callers checked for it.  It's more likely to fail now,
+      because overflow errors are properly detected now.  The proper way
+      to check: ::
+
+          double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
+          if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
+              /* The conversion failed. */
+              }