Splitting repo config over multiple files

A recent change to the config parsing in yum has broken the particular way 
in which I configure my package repositories. It looks like it's no longer 
possible to split the configuration for a single repository across 
multiple .repo files.

Sure, this wasn't exactly a documented "feature", but I had found it very 
useful. In particular, I had used it to configure the "protectbase" plugin 
to protect the repos for my distro, Fedora. Rather than adding "protect=1" 
to each section in the fedora*.repo files (which would mean they wouldn't 
update properly when fedora-release got updated), I had added all the 
extra config into a separate protect.repo file:

   [fedora]
   protect=1

   [updates]
   protect=1

   [development]
   protect=1

   ...etc...

This worked fine up to yum-3.2.3. From yum-3.2.4 onwards, I get 
"Repository '...' is listed more than once" and "Repository '...' is 
missing name" errors.

I'm pretty sure it was the patch to use iniparse that broke it 
(http://devel.linux.duke.edu/gitweb/?p=yum.git;a=commitdiff;h=23f0fe4). 
Using a separate ConfigParser object for each file means that it has no 
chance to merge sections with the same name.

Is this "feature" -- even if it is undocumented -- something that yum 
should allow?

- Michael