Couple thoughts. Firstly, the human-editable bit: who in the last *decade* has been writing code using a non-syntax-aware/helping editor? Its a supremely uninteresting aspect IMO. On ConfigParser - yes, its horrid. OTOH we do get all the lines reliably, and setuptools will need to cover the unicode aspect itself in its own time. All we need to do is permit # inline as a comment - line a requirements.txt file for pip - and it becomes trivial to parse in all cases that we need *now*. Either we are defining the long term thing now, in which case that huge pile of complexity lands on us, and we have to get everything right. Or we are defining a thing which solves the present bug, and as long as we make sure it does not bind us in future, we're not hamstrung. E.g. use setup.cfg now. Add pybuild.toml later. (btw, terrible name, as pybuild is a thing in the debian space, and this will confuse the heck out of folk). https://wiki.debian.org/Python/Pybuild -Rob -- Robert Collins <rbtcollins@hpe.com> Distinguished Technologist HP Converged Cloud