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I think this patch does more bad than good.

A practical problem is that os.path.walk doesn't work anymore if there are 
non-ascii directories in the directory tree (os.listdir will return these as unicode names, but doesn't accept unicode on input). See bug #696261. An additional problem is that various other methods in posix don't do the unicode conversion, so for instance os.getcwd() will return 8-bit strings in Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding which are incompatible with the unicode returned by listdir.

My preferred solution would be to do the unicode trick everywhere. Second best would be to retract the whole thing and think about it a bit more for Python 2.4.