Trying to make this change in 2.7 would actually be a bit of a nightmare - how do you cleanly split documentation of the binary data and text processing sequence types when "str" is used for both?

The change would be *mostly* feasible in 3.2 (that's why I started my branch from there), but there are still some sharp edges that go away in 3.3 (mainly the narrow/wide Unicode split).

So unless anyone is really keen to see the update in 3.2, my current plan is to leave the maintenance versions alone and only update it for 3.3. Going that way also provides better opportunities for post-checkin feedback from folks that aren't set up to build the docs themselves (rebuilding the docs is fairly straightforward on *nix, but Terry tells me that using Windows complicates that process quite a bit).