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The GC module currently relies only on the presence of a __del__ method to decide if an object can be safely collected at all. Also, there is a special case for generator objects.
This patch allows any object to call an api during its traversal,
PyObject_GC_Collectable(), to indicate whether it is fit to be collected at this time, overriding any presence of a __del__ method or not.
This mechanism is being put in place in stackless python 2.7 because tasklets cannot always be collected depending on their runtime state, and I thought this might be a useful addition for regular python, especially since there already is such a dynamic special case for generator objects.