Larry - I'm kinda stumped on this one. I'm not sure how to debug the failure on the buildbots, because, as Victor said, sys.stdout/err having an encoding attribute of None *isn't* supposed to happen, so the test should be fine as it stands. And nobody has been able to reproduce the problem on a direct run.

It's probably OK to leave the test disabled for the alpha (since even the failures show that *this* feature was working correctly, it was the test case itself that was breaking).

While I just noticed my RHEL buildbot hit the failure as well, Stefan's inability to reproduce the problem on his FreeBSD system suggests that isn't likely to help: http://buildbot.python.org/all/builders/x86%20RHEL%206%203.x/builds/2871/steps/test/logs/stdio

(And /facepalm moment, I just realised all my testing tonight has been pointless, because I forgot to remove the skip decorator from the offending test...)