michael.foord: I am now persuaded that the feature requested here ought be reconsidered (since my last comment there's been a lot of chatter about it behind closed doors at work, but I can at least cite https://github.com/abseil/abseil-py/issues/166 as a public example of the question coming up).

Would it be appropriate to file a new issue? My issue tracker training brought me up to believe that it's better to reopen an existing closed issue in a circumstance like this, but I respect that that may not be the custom in this issue tracker, and besides I lack the permission in this issue tracker to reopen this issue. 😛