Antoine, to answer your question about universal newlines in pickle in msg87622. The pickle.py docsstrings in 2.7+ contain the following text (amongst others): 

        The optional protocol argument tells the pickler to use the
        given protocol; supported protocols are 0, 1, 2.  The default
        protocol is 0, to be backwards compatible.  (Protocol 0 is the
        only protocol that can be written to a file opened in text
        mode and read back successfully.  When using a protocol higher
        than 0, make sure the file is opened in binary mode, both when
        pickling and unpickling.)

This clearly indicates that protocol 0 is supposed to compatible with text-mode files. That would mean this issue probably is not invalid, the documentation above implies that a pickle file written in text mode on Windows should be readable on a Unix system.

That said, I'd advise anyone to use the highest possible protocol because higher protocol levels are more efficient and better support newstyle classes.