[development] Possibility of API *additions* post-code freeze?

[Angela Byron]

For this volunteer project I'm working on, I'm developing an install  
profile. It occurs to me that there aren't really any nice ready-made  
functions for doing a lot of basic stuff in Drupal like:

- Creating a role, with a given list of permissions
- Adding a user to a role
- Enabling an input format
- Turning on/off a block
- etc.

I can try and roll patches for these as I go, however this is  
something I'm doing in my "spare" time so likely I won't have  
encountered even 1/100th  of the possible optimizations by Sept 1,  
and will have time for rolling patches for very few of them, if any.  
And while I could create my own little helper module to define these,  
that means a lot of copy/paste from core which is constantly  
changing, so it makes sense for these changes to be in core. I could  
see the addition of some of these API functions also being useful for  
things like XML-RPC, and also for making it easier for people to  
create their own Drupal distributions. Erm, usability? ;)

I'm wondering if it's possible to add functions like this to the API,  
and change core to use them, post-code freeze? I know we normally  
don't allow API changes, but this wouldn't be _changing_ anything,  
per se.. people calling huge_gargantuan_function($op = something)  
would still get the same behaviour. It's just that internally,  
huge_gargantuan_function would be split it up into helper functions  
that each did distinct things.

Just curious. :) Thanks.

-Angie