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>
> I am dubious that there are any with a mixture of both sections and
> additional option lines at the top without a section.
>
rsyncd.conf [1] is one such example, and I wouldn't say there aren't
countless more in the wild.
> Anyone writing an app and planning to parse a .ini file can add [Start] or
> [Setup] at the top.
>
Indeed. Here lies the problem of this unfortunate issue:
MissingSectionHeaderError is only ever caught [9] to mitigate this **awful
default behavior** and attach a dummy section at the top, as you say. Or
can anyone care to propose another relevant use case for this poorly (un-)
thought through exception?
> I think a more useful new configparser feature would be to keep comment
> lines and write them back out after a configuration is changed.
>
While this is very much off-topic, configobj [3] does too seem to have done
so since ages.