@telmich: I think you will have more success at getting what you want if you work with us rather than being confrontational.  Respect that we have reasons for doing things a certain way (and not because we are stupid), and we will respect your perspective more, and be more likely to do something about the real problem that you face.

Or, you could submit a patch...and again work *with* us to get it accepted.

Emitting a traceback on KeyboardInterrupt has served us well in the past, even in the startup case to which you are pointing.  If someone makes a mistake in site.py or similar and causes python startup to hang, a traceback on keyboard interrupt is exactly what you want.  You may think that this situation is unlikely to occur, but it is far *more* likely to occur than your situation...given, as Antoine said, that you are the first person to report this as a problem.

So, we need a solution that serves both use cases.  An environment flag or command line option seems to fit the bill.

Now we need a patch.

As far as feature request vs bug, fixing this without removing an existing feature (interrupting a hung startup with a traceback) requires a new option or environment variable, and therefore *by our rules* this can only go into 3.3.  That makes it an enhancement by our (project specific) definition, regardless of whether or not it is a bug by the broader definition of bug.