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Moved to the Feature Request tracker, and changed the 
summary to something more accurate.

The restriction to string keys is documented, and the code is 
functioning as documented.  The restriction is hard to lift 
because the underlying database technologies (gdbm, bsddb) 
require string keys.

I suppose Shelf could encode all incoming keys via utf-8, in 
every method taking a key argument, and decode again in all 
ways of getting keys out, but that wouldn't be backward 
compatible.

Unassigned Marc-Andre since I doubt he's going to do 
something about this.