DOC: add a more useful comment to compat.py3k.py

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/numpy/compat/py3k.py b/numpy/compat/py3k.py
index c9ed9d52c..90e17d6d6 100644
--- a/numpy/compat/py3k.py
+++ b/numpy/compat/py3k.py
@@ -1,9 +1,15 @@
 """
-Python 3 compatibility tools.
+Python 3.X compatibility tools.
 
-"""
-from __future__ import division, absolute_import, print_function
+While this file was originally intented for Python 2 -> 3 transition,
+it is now used to create a compatibility layer between different
+minor versions of Python 3.
 
+While the active version of numpy may not support a given version of python, we
+allow downstream libraries to continue to use these shims for forward
+compatibility with numpy while they transition their code to newer versions of
+Python.
+"""
 __all__ = ['bytes', 'asbytes', 'isfileobj', 'getexception', 'strchar',
            'unicode', 'asunicode', 'asbytes_nested', 'asunicode_nested',
            'asstr', 'open_latin1', 'long', 'basestring', 'sixu',