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I've started work on integrating the latest patch.
Some notes (primarily for my own use):
* I'll drop support for the JSON format, that format is not used
 by Apple's libraries (although the plutil tool can convert plists
 to JSON)
* The patch (plistlib_with_tests.diff) no longer applies cleanly,
 there are two rejected hunks in test_plist.py. 
* There is no documentation update in the patch, I'm working on that
* There is also an NextStep format (see <http://code.google.com/p/networkpx/wiki/PlistSpec>. 
 That format is not supported by plutil, but is supported by 
 Apple's libraries. Support for this can be added later.
* plistlib needs futher work as well, it would be nice to move closer
 to the PEP8 coding style (although this should be done carefully to
 maintain compatibility with existing code.
* plistlib.Data should be deprecated. The class was needed in python 2.7,
 but python 3 already has a unambiguous representation for binary data:
 the bytes type.
* It might be nice to add some options from the json library to 
 the serialization function:
 * skipkeys=True/False: skip keys that aren't strings and cannot
 be represented in a plist file, instead of raising TypeError
 * check_circular=True/False: explicitly check for circular recursion
 and raise an exception instead of hoping that some other
 exception occurs
 * default=function(obj): a function that is called on values that
 cannot be represented, should either return a value that can
 be encoded or raise TypeError
 
* Issue #11101 mentions that it would be nice to have an option
 to ignore keys whose value is None. I'm not sure if this is really
 useful, and if it is it might be better to add a "skip values" option
 that ignores items where the value cannot be encoded.