I am calling platform.linux_distribution() and platform.platform() on a modified Debian distribution with Python 2.6.
FWIW the file /etc/debian_version exists on this machine, but is empty.

On calling platform.platform(), it seems to try to read the linux version from /etc/debian_version, but crashes with the following exception:

Python 2.6 (r26:66714, Mar  4 2010, 13:02:59)
[GCC 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-13)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import platform
>>> platform.platform()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/platform.py", line 1524, in platform
    distname,distversion,distid = dist('')
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/platform.py", line 361, in dist
    full_distribution_name=0)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/platform.py", line 333, in linux_distribution
    _distname, _version, _id = _parse_release_file(firstline)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/platform.py", line 269, in _parse_release_file
    return '', version, id
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'version' referenced before assignment

Duplicate of #7773 which was fixed with r77735.