Following the discussion on python-dev [1], this issue will track the re-organization of Lib/xml/etree to expose the C implementation (_elementtree) by default when importing ElementTree. The test suite will also have to be updated - it's required that it exercises both the C and the Python implementations.

I would like to make the import "magic" simple. Thus, the idea I currently plan to pursue is:

* xml/etree/ElementTree.py will be a simple facade that attempts to 'import *' from _elementtree, and on failure does 'import *' from pyElementTree
* The current contents of xml/etree/ElementTree.py will move to xml/etree/pyElementTree.py
* xml/etree/cElementTree.py disappears.

The test suite will be modified accordingly.


I'll be working on creating a patch for this. Any help, ideas, comments and discussions are more than welcome.


[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-February/116278.html