>> So I guess there is little interest in fixing codecs because io is the
>> preferred package for reading unicode files.

> I guess Victor have an interest. ;)

Ah ah, good joke. I wrote the PEP 400:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0400/

And yes, for best performances, you have to choose between codecs and
io module depending on the Python version. It suggest to always use
the io module because it has more features, like universal newline,
and less bugs.