Florent, thanks for the patch - at this point code is more useful than talk :-)

Anyhow, I tried to apply it and a few tests in test_xml_etree_c fail, because it can't find fromstring and fromstringlist. This gets fixed when I import fromstringlist in cElementTree.py from ElementTree, and in the same file assign:

  fromstring = XML

Which is similar to what ElementTree itself does.

In general, I agree that a good first step would be to refactor the code to extract the boostrapping from _elementtree.c to cElementTree.py. As long as the tests pass, this can be committed regardless of this issue's original intent.

However, why did you leave some bootstrapping code inside? Can't all of it go away?