Python code byte-compiled with -OO has doc-strings stripped out. 

This creates problems when compiling different packages which changes the doc-strings by doing something like this:
     __doc__ += "additional text"
(when the docstring is 'None', this will fail).

The packages "lmfit 0.8.1" and "Patsy 0.3.0" have this problem, and must be patched before compilation.

See related discussion on Stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22299532/unsupported-operand-types-for-nonetype-and-str-winappdbg-error-after-c

Proposal: Set the doc-strings to empty string ("") instead of removing them completely during optimization with -OO. The memory footprint would anyway be the same.