The patch shouldn't be applied as it stands, though, because it's not complete; similiar changes need to be made to the Unicode type, for a start.

To answer Skip's question: I don't remember the logic of the format code.  I think the FORMAT_TYPE_UNKNOWN check may be unnecessary; the code could just always do format_type = _TUPLE, occasionally doing a redundant assignment (but who cares)?

I don't think I'll have any chance to work on this; PyCon is keeping me busy, and the mailbox bugs will take priority for me.