Florent,

Your updated patch looks good. I think that the explicit import of _namespace_map into cElementTree is just to satisfy some weird magic in the tests and can probably be removed as well (along with the weird magic :-), but that's not really important and can be left for later cleanups.

Regarding the documentation, alright let's not mention the implementation detail, and your "versionchanged" addition makes sense. I don't think adding directly to whatsnew/3.3.rst is necessary, updating Misc/NEWS is enough.

I'll apply the documentation patch after you apply the code patch. Or if you want, you can apply it yourself, I don't mind.

Thanks for the cooperation!