contextlib.nested has recently been deprecated on grounds of being unnecessary now that the with statement accepts multiple context managers. However, as has been mentioned before (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-May/089359.html), that doesn't cover the case of a variable number of context managers, i.e. with contextlib.nested(*list_of_managers) as list_of_results: or with contexlib.nested(*iterator_of_managers): It was suggested that in these use cases a custom context manager should be implemented. However, it seems that such an implementation would be an almost exact copy of the present code for "nested". I'm proposing to add an iterator version of "nested" to contextlib (possibly called "inested"), which takes an iterable of context managers instead of a variable number of parameters. The implementation could be taken over from the present "nested", only changing "def nested(*managers)" to "def inested(managers)". This has the advantage that an iterator can be passed to "inested", so that each context managers is created in the context of all previous ones, which was one of the reasons for introducing the multi-with statement in the first place. "contextlib.inested" would therefore be the generalization of the multi-with statement to a variable number of managers (and "contextlib.nested" would stay deprecated). - Hagen