Please note:  I'm unable to fill in your contributor agreement form, so please consider the patch an illustrative example.  In any case, the fix is pretty-much a one-liner, so shouldn't be a big deal to 're-write'.

I'm disappointed that this has been largely overlooked since I raised it.  It's a clear regression in Python3 and represents a show-stopper for people wanting to switch from 2->3.  I would imagine you *want* people to migrate to 3, so I'm baffled by the response or lack thereof.  Sure, I know everyone is busy but this is pretty basic stuff.