> platform.system() fails with UnicodeEncodeError on systems that have their computer name set to a name containing non-ascii characters. The implementation of platform.system() uses at some point socket.gethostname() ( see http://www.pasteall.org/16215 for a stacktrace of such usage)

This trace is from a Windows system, where the platform module
uses gethostname() in its cross-platform uname() function, which
platform.system() and various other functions in the module rely
on.  On a Unix system, platform.uname() depends on os.uname()
working, meaning that these functions still fail when the
hostname cannot be decoded, as it is part of os.uname()'s return
value.

Given that os.uname() is a primary source of information about
the platform on Unix systems, this sort of collateral damage from
an undecodable hostname is likely to occur in more places.

> It would be more than great if this error could be fixed. If another 3.1 release is planned, preferrably for that.

If you'd like to try the surrogateescape patches, they ought to
fix this.  The relevant patches are ascii-surrogateescape-2.diff,
try-surrogateescape-first-4.diff and uname-surrogateescape.diff.