PEP-0372 and Issue 5381 both say json.dumps respect OrderedDict's 
iteration order, but the example in them do not work on my latest trunk 
build.

$ uname -a
Linux 12.38 2.6.18-128.el5 #1 SMP Wed Dec 17 11:41:38 EST 2008 x86_64 
x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ python2.7
Python 2.7a0 (trunk, May 21 2009, 08:00:00) 
[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-44)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import json
>>> from collections import OrderedDict
>>> items = [('one', 1), ('two', 2), ('three', 3), ('four', 4), ('five', 
5)]
>>> json.dumps(OrderedDict(items))
'{"four": 4, "three": 3, "five": 5, "two": 2, "one": 1}'

This only seems to be the case with the C implementation of json (_json). 

>>> json.encoder.c_make_encoder = None
>>> json.dumps(OrderedDict(items))
'{"one": 1, "two": 2, "three": 3, "four": 4, "five": 5}'

I think the culprit is encoder_listencode_dict (Modules/_json.c:2049).
It uses PyDict_Next to fetch all items from the dictionary and thereby
loses order. A special code branch for dict subclasses
(!PyDict_CheckExact) which uses PyIter* instead should solve the
problem. (PyDict_Next should not honor order no matter what IMO.)

If nobody beats me to it I can try to come up with a patch.

I can't see that the order of keys should matter for language-neutral
serialization libs like json or xmlrpclib.  You're quite possibly
going to be communicating with something on the other end which doesn't
have an OrderedDict-like class.  Why add the extra complication to the
library?

Even with Python of recent enough vintage at both ends, I can't see
that you could dumps() an OrderedDict then loads() the resulting
string and get an OrderedDict out as a result.  You should get a dict,
right?

Skip, the json API for 2.7/3.1 includes an object_pairs_hook that allows
an OrderedDict to be generated from a json file.  The OP is pointing out
that the latest C upgrade prevents round-tripping while preserving
order.  Use cases for that were discussed in the thread for the
object_pairs_hook.  While you can't count on order preservation on both
ends, there are tools such as PHP that do preserve order.  Also, when
working with manually type user inputs (such as config files), it is
nice when updates generally keep the file in its original order so that
it is clear what had changed.

r72961 Fixed for Py3.1.  Leaving open until backported to 2.7.

Benjamin, it's a little late for this one for 2.7.  Do you prefer to close it forever or to treat it as a bug fix for 2.7.1?

I think we should close it.

Upon further consideration, I think this could be backported.

Backported to 2.7
See r85966