Antoine mentioned in email that the reference handling should be changed, so here's a shot at it. I also condensed and renamed the convenience functions - I was paying too much attention to the surrounding conventions and made this harder than it had to be.

Looks good on the principle. Implementation is a bit weird: you don't need to check name and path for NULL-ness?

Oh, and is PyErr_SetExcWithArgsKwargs still useful?

How about this patch? Adds NULL checking and merges PyErr_SetExcWithArgsKwargs inside PyErr_SetImportError since it's not needed by itself. Docs are also updated in line with these changes.

You probably want to check args and kwargs for NULL-ness too. Otherwise, looks good.

New changeset 7a32b9380ffd by Brian Curtin in branch 'default':
Fix #14600. Correct reference handling and naming of ImportError convenience function
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/7a32b9380ffd

As was pointed on python-dev for the first commit:

    args = PyTuple_New(1);
    if (args == NULL)
        return NULL;

    kwargs = PyDict_New();
    if (args == NULL)
        return NULL;

It looks like the second block has a copy-paste typo and should check kwargs, not args.

Eric: your note appears to be fixed in the code.
Can this issue be closed?

Yep, bf23a6c215f6 fixed it, thanks for the ping.  Brian or Antoine, can you close this or was there something else?