Backout ad09ce1d393c and replace ''' with """ to make some highlighting happy. I have tried Debian's default emacs and the current CVS version. Default emacs doesn't have highlighting enabled (and being emacs-illiterate I don't know how to enable it) and the CVS emacs' Python highlighting has no problems with ' characters here.

adding base
abort: qdelete requires at least one revision or patch name
abort: cannot delete applied patch c
Now at: b
a
b
a
b
series
status
Now at: a
a
b
series
status
1 [mq]: a
0 base
abort: cannot delete revision 3 above applied patches
f
4 [mq]: f
3 [mq]: e
2 [mq]: d
1 [mq]: a
0 base