This behavior change is actually present in 2.7.1, 3.1.3 and 3.2.  I’m concerned that you’ve found a bug with it (thanks for the report), and that we may have to change behavior again.

First, could you open another report about comment handling in read_manifest?  I overlooked that, and it should be fixed as quickly as possible, although there’s very little change this will make it into 3.2.0 (we’ll have 3.2.1 though).

Second, can you give us a test script (shell or Python) or a set of instructions we can reproduce to observe the behavior you say is defective?  Thanks in advance.