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The documentation fix for bug 463330, describing the
newline added by base64.encode and base64.encodestring
appears to be incorrect!
The "courtesy newline" is appended to the result, not
the input (at line 466 of binsacii.c), so it is *not*
true that
base64.encodestring('hello') ==
base64.encodestring('hello\n')
In fact:
 base64.encodestring('hello') == 'aGVsbG8=\n'
 base64.encodestring('hello\n') == 'aGVsbG8K\n'
This applies to documentation for 2.2 and 2.2.1, and
actual behaviour has been checked in 2.2 

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Barry, is this the intended behavior or should the comment 
in the docs be eliminated? The conversation in 
www.python.org/sf/463330 was not clear to me on this point.
Confirmed:
>>> import base64
>>> v = base64.encodestring('hello!')
>>> w = base64.encodestring('hello!\n')
>>> v == w, v , w
(False, 'aGVsbG8h\n', 'aGVsbG8hCg==\n')

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The intended behavior is irrelevant <wink>. Since this is
how the base64 module works, it needs to be correctly
documented. It's way too late to be changing this behavior,
as broken as some might think it is.:)
Note that the email package has an RFC 2045-2047 compliant
base64 encoding module called email.base64MIME. It
currently isn't documented (but will be before 2.3 is released).
Reassigning to Fred so he can correct the base64 documentation.

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Fred, is the attached patch okay to commit to 2.3 and 
release 22-maint?

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Barry, you're the MIME guru, tell Raymond whether he should
check in his patch. ;-)

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I'm not sure the patch is sufficient. You need to at least
explain that a newline is always added to the output.

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Please approve the new patch.

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Actually, I realized encodestring() is a bit more subtle
than that. I think what it actually does is "return a
string containing one or more lines of base64-encoded data"
always including an extra trailing newline.

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Inserted new wording into patch below.
Do you also want this backported to release22-maint?

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I think the patch should apply to both release21-maint and
release22-maint as well as the trunk. I don't think this
describes a recently introduced behavior in the base64 module.

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Fred's right, the behavior is long standing. I'm good with
the patch. Reassigning to Raymond for application of patch,
who should close this report once that's done.

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Committed as libbase64.tex 1.21 and 1.20.6.1.
Closing bug.