This patch modifies the whatsnew25.tex to reflect
changes to the locale module.

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The patch is wrong, format() did never allow anything other
than a single %char. (The difference is that it's now
documented).

A little bit more should be written about the two new functions.

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I'm able to pass a string in 2.4; what am I doing wrong?
I'll update the patch with more details on the other two
functions.

Python 2.4.2 (#1, Oct 16 2005, 05:52:17)
[GCC 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-13)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.format('This is my %dnd test', 2)
'This is my 2nd test'
>>>

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Updated the patch to add some more details on format_string
and currency functions.

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Okay, that works. But look at

>>> locale.format('test %0.2f %0.2f', (2.0, 2.0))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/locale.py", line 143, in format
    raise Error, "Too many decimal points in result string"
locale.Error: Too many decimal points in result string

or 

>>> locale.format('%i .test', 0)
'0 ,test'

(in a German locale). So the only thing format() did do
without unwanted side-effects was and is to convert exactly
one %char code.

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Updated description of changes to format

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Applied in rev. 51169 with some markup and wording changes.
Thanks!