> Well, my understanding was Type:behavior was a bug fix and Type:
> feature request was a new feature request, which may change some
> underlying behavior. I thought this issue was on the border.

The original issue is against robotparser, and clearly states a bug
(robotparser doesn't work in some cases).
But solving a bug by adding a feature isn't appropriate for a bugfix
release.

You shouldn't look at how the issue is classified. What's important is
what the actual *patch* does.

A patch doesn't have to change existing behaviour to be considered a
feature. That's a misconception. Feature releases try to be
forward-compatible as well (if I use urllib.quote() in 2.Y, it will
still work in 2.Y+1).

Adding API parameters, or accepting additional types in an existing API,
is clearly a new feature.

> Ideally, this could have gone in 2.7, but I missed it.  Personally, I
> am still +1 in having this in 2.7.1. Is it undesirable? Does it need
> wider discussion?

We can certainly make exceptions from time to time but only when there's
a strong argument for it (e.g. a security issue). There doesn't seem to
be an urgency to make urllib.quote() work with non-ASCII unicode strings
in 2.7.1, while it didn't before anyway.

Furthermore, the core issue is the automatic coercion between unicode
and 8-bit strings in 2.x. Many APIs are affected by this, urllib.quote()
shouldn't be considered a special case.