The patch removes the import of cStringIO from all Python files and disabled the cStringIO module. It leaves the file around.

Open problems:
* How should io.StringIO handle buffer objects?

File Added: stringio_deprecation.patch

I guess that if you want to handle buffer objects, you should be using io.BytesIO.

The new patch also removes StringIO and adds a facade cStringIO. Importing StringIO and cStringIO is deprecated and the imports fall back to io.StringIO.
File Added: remove_stringio.patch

I'll take this.  Thanks for the work!  There are a few tests that break due to this, I'll look into these.  I'll probably kill StringIO and cStringIO hard rather than adding deprecations (there's already a 2to3 fixer that fixes most StringIO references).

Thanks!

Committed revision 56841.

I had to change some places to use BytesIO instead of StringIO, and I had to work hard on a few modules, esp. uu.py.  But now all tests pass (except the ones that didn't pass before).

As George said, io.BytesIO should be used for buffer objects.

Thanks for your work, it will help me a lot for testing the new accelerator module for StringIO/BytesIO.

One unit test is still import StringIO although it doesn't use it:

Index: Lib/ctypes/test/test_loading.py
===================================================================
--- Lib/ctypes/test/test_loading.py     (Revision 56879)
+++ Lib/ctypes/test/test_loading.py     (Arbeitskopie)
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 from ctypes import *
 import sys, unittest
-import os, StringIO
+import os
 from ctypes.util import find_library
 from ctypes.test import is_resource_enabled

Ow, thanks!

Committed revision 56880.