I wrote:

I agree with Barry. Not only should they be in the stdlib, but they should have very clear warnings in their docstrings and other documentation that state that they are ONLY safe to use in single-threaded programs.

This achieves two things: it makes them available to those who need them (not everyone uses threads!), and it rather forcefully makes the point that it's NOT usually a good idea to modify global state info in a context manager because doing so is not generally threadsafe.

Nick Coghlan replies:

Wouldn't they be able to actually emit a warning at run-time if they're used in a multi-threaded program? That would be even better motivation for including them, IMO.

I don't think that would be desirable. These things CAN be useful in a multi-threaded program if you know what you're doing. One common example would be to use them only from the main thread. -- Michael Chermside