I'm trying to emit a single line of csv without any line terminators, but specifying lineterminator=None results in a "lineterminator must be set" error, and setting lineterminator='' results in lack of quotes around certain fields.

    with open("foo.csv", "wb") as csvfile:
        csvw = csv.writer(csvfile, quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL, lineterminator='')
        csvw.writerow(["col1","col2\ndata", "col3"])

I expected the contents of the file to be:
col1,"col2
data",col3

It should be possible to change the lineterminator without changing the quoting behavior.
At the very least, the documentation needs to explain better what logic is used to determine whether something gets quoted, and what affects that.

If the line terminator is not \n, there is no reason to quote values with \n in them. (Try your code with lineterminator set to 'd' to see what I mean.)

Also, it is hard to see how to make this clearer:

csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL
Instructs writer objects to only quote those fields which contain special characters such as delimiter, quotechar or any of the characters in lineterminator.

Hmm. Perhaps it would be a bit clearer if it said "... which contain the special characters delimiter, quotechar, ..."

Note that quotechar is only quoted if doublequote is true.

The reader does not support non-quoted and non-escaped \r and \n, independently from lineterminator. So they should always be quoted or escaped.