> Note that in 3.2 memoryview would return "equal" for arrays that
> simply aren't equal, if those arrays happen to have the same bit
> pattern.

This is exactly my point. If a "memoryview" has the same "memory"
as another, why are they then not rightfully considered equal?
IOW, the 3.2 behavior looks fine to me.

You apparently have a vision that equality should mean something
different for memoryviews - please explicitly state what that
view is. A mathematical definition ("two memoryviews A and B
are equal iff ...") would be appreciated.

> One way to deal with this is to demand a strict canonical form
> of format strings for PEP-3118, see msg167687.

You are talking about the solution already - I still don't know
what the problem is exactly (not that I *need* to understand
the problem, but at a minimum, the documentation should state
what the intended behavior is - better if people would also
agree that the proposed behavior is "reasonable").

For 3.3, I see two approaches: either move backwards to the
3.2 behavior and defer this change to 3.4 - this would make
it release-critical indeed. Or move forward to a yet-to-be
specified equality operation which as of now may not be
implemented correctly, treating any improvement to it
as a bug fix.