there's enough "Mode U cannot be combined" stuff in the PEP to make me think that they're slightly more than just a minor variation.
I think you can simplify the PEP somewhat by emphasizing the difference. making things simpler is never a bad idea.
Also, changing the mode is a morelocalized change (it's all in fileobject.c).
I'm willing to do the work necessary to provide an alternate factory/constructor. from what I can tell, all that has to be done is is to apply the patch, and do some fairly straight- forward refactoring.
(and perhaps some slight API renaming -- the functions in there are clearly too useful to deserve names like Py_UniversalNewlineFgets -- "there is no permanent place in this world for ugly names" ;-)
so +1 on checking it in as it stands, but -0 on not touching the result until 2.3 final...
OK, good. I'll leave this between you & Jack then. I'll try to make sure you two actually do something about the open items before 2.3 is released! --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)