I looked at the patch a bit more in depth and must admit that I'm reluctant to apply it. It's a very large patch with very little documentation about what steps are taken and why, and I just don't see the motivation. 

The way I see it, PEP 384 is great for compatibility of third-party extensions and embeddings of Python, but much less critical for a module that's always distributed as part of stdlib and thus is kept in exact sync with the ABI of the Python version it comes with. Correct me if I'm wrong.

That said, I won't object to some refactoring if it improves the code. But when such large changes are proposed, I really prefer to see small, incremental patches that replace just a part of the code. Such patches should come with an explanation of why the change is made (i.e. which part of PEP 384 does it adhere to).