The patch actually isn't all that complicated - the main structural
change to make it possible to process the strings correctly is
converting the parser functions to have treat the flags argument as an
I/O variable, rather than just an input. Other than that, there are just
some fairly straightforward updates to the compiler to take advantage of
the additional flag information now available from the parser.

Being able to write significant pieces of code that run on both 2.6 and
3.0 without modification will be a big win in my opinion. While 2to3
will still be a valuable migration tool, especially for one-way
migrations, it will be far far easier to support 2.6 and 3.0 in parallel
if that pseudo-compilation step isn't necessary.

Also Christian - the posted patch accidentally included your hack to
make the version info a bit more non-SVN checkout friendly.