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It is clear that something which used to work no longer 
works, and I'm just wondering if the breakage is necessary.  
I'm not sure what all was involved with respect to timeouts 
and why the makefile() implementation had to change.  I 
guess I see 3 problems:

1) Previously functional code breaks.  While marshal is 
not "general purpose" in the sense it can't deal with 
instances, etc. it is still very useful and for data which 
doesn't contain many redundant references (where cPickle 
reduces them) it is the most efficient way to serialize and 
unserialize "native" python types.

2) The performance of everything which uses the results of 
socket.makefile() now suffers the cost of a pure-python 
implementation where it had perviously been optimized as a C 
implementation on platforms which supported it (most).

3) Any other 3rd party C extensions which use the 
PyFile_Check (and would previously have worked) break.

Is there another way to solve the timeout problem?  Breaking 
something which has worked since 1.5 somehow feels wrong 
to me.