I'm sorry but we can't do anything about this for Python 2.7 anymore. There's a big danger of altering how existing config files in the wild are being parsed, which is why we only broke compatibility once, with the release of Python 3.2. Even then, doing it very carefully, we found a few instances of painful parsing differences (.pypirc being the most widely spread example).

So, the fix here is to switch to Python 3 or use the configparser backport available on PyPI.