This seems to be working on the buildbots for 3.5 now (buildbot failures appear to be due to other issues).

However, I'd still like to discuss the idea of backporting this to 3.4.1.

From a Fedora point of view, it's still *very* easy to flip an environment into POSIX mode, so even if the system is appropriately configured to use UTF-8 everywhere, Python 3.4 may still blow up if a script or application ends up running under the POSIX locale.

That has long made Toshio nervous about the migration of core services to Python 3 (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Python_3_as_Default), and his concerns make sense to me, as that migration covers little things like the installer, package manager, post-image install initialisation, etc. I'm not sure the Fedora team can deliver on the "Users shouldn't notice any changes, except that packages in minimal buildroot and on LiveCD will be python3-, not python-." aspect of the change proposal without this behavioural tweak in the 3.4 series as well.

Note that this *isn't* a blocker for the migration - if it was, it would be mentioned in the Fedora proposal. However, I think there's a risk to the Fedora user experience if the status quo remains in place for the life of Python 3.4, and I'd hate for the first encounter Fedora users have with Python 3 to be inexplicable tracebacks from components that have been migrated.