Merge from alioth

Replace deprecated string.$foo($bar, $ARGS) calls with $bar.$foo($ARGS).
Also cherry pick two fixes on the patch from later in that tree:
  revno: 375
  committer: Mark Hymers <mhy@debian.org>
  branch nick: userdir-ldap-common
  timestamp: Thu 2008-01-10 13:44:07 +0000
  message:
    Don't convert strings to integers, just check that they could be converted.

    Noticed by Peter (again)
  --
  revno: 376
  committer: Mark Hymers <mhy@debian.org>
  branch nick: userdir-ldap-common
  timestamp: Thu 2008-01-10 13:48:43 +0000
  message:
    and some more old CheckNumber fixes