I was working on the rewrite branch last week (implementing xmlreader, additional retrieving of special pages, hooking cosmetic_changes with new functionality and some other stuff)
At least I am a bit frustrated: I guess nobody uses it as I found some blocker in the code and mainly it runs very very slow. The time consumption is more than 10 times of the trunk release. Maybe the cacherequest is still unfinished but I cannot follow the site request since -verbose gives no additional output about that. Is there another switch?
As I am not able to keep both releases on the same level an merge it vice versa, I would like to ask the next steps and how to proceed in that manner.
btw I created a matrix for python version / pwb release at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikipediabot/Overview. Because of the unicode bug (which is triggered by py 2.5/2.6/2.71) it is strictly recommended to use python 2.7.2 or 2.7.2 for the trunk. I guess that bug does not affect the rewrite. But we need 2.6 for some method decorators.
And at last: thanks Merlijn for the pwb.py shortener.
Regards xqt