The new xattr support in shutil causes shutil.copytree and shutil.copy2 to fail inelegantly on (source) filesystems that do not support xattrs (like NFS):

# /home/twouters does not support xattrs
>>> os.listxattr("/home/twouters/foo")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: [Errno 95] Operation not supported: '/home/twouters/foo'

>>> shutil.copytree("/home/twouters/spam", "/tmp/spam")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/twouters/gvs-pristine/python/Python-3.Lib/shutil.py", line 345, in copytree
    raise Error(errors)
shutil.Error: [('/home/twouters/spam/ham', '/tmp/spam/ham', "[Errno 95] Operation not supported: '/home/twouters/spam/ham'"), ('/home/twouters/spam/eggs', '/tmp/spam/eggs', "[Errno 95] Operation not supported: '/home/twouters/spam/eggs'"), ('/home/twouters/spam', '/tmp/spam', "[Errno 95] Operation not supported: '/home/twouters/spam'")]

(The actual files will have been copied, since xattr copies are done after everything else.)  Interestingly shutil._copyxattr does try to cope with unsupported xattrs on the *target* filesystem (which seems like it might be a mistake to do, since it loses data), just not the original filesystem (which seems like a sensible thing instead):

# /tmp does support xattrs
>>> os.listxattr("/tmp/spam")
[]
>>> shutil.copytree("/tmp/spam", "/home/twouters/spam-new")
'/home/twouters/spam-new'

The attached patch fixes shutil._copyxattr to also ignore unsupported/empty xattrs (but not permission errors) on the source. (I'm not certain if errno.ENODATA can be expected from os.listxattr(), but internet searches suggest that some people think so, and I don't know what other meaning it could have.)

Could you add regression tests to your patch please?

Updated patch with test.

Now really updated the patch.

New changeset 47c65639390d by Hynek Schlawack in branch '3.3':
#17076: Make copying of xattrs more permissive of missing FS support
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/47c65639390d

New changeset 7ccdbd1cd213 by Hynek Schlawack in branch 'default':
#17076: Make copying of xattrs more permissive of missing FS support
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/7ccdbd1cd213

The buildbots look happy, thank you for spotting & the patch Thomas!