Logged In: YES 
user_id=21627

This should be discussed on python-dev. I don't think the
change in return type should be backported - it has a real
chance of breaking applications (which suddenly start seeing
Unicode strings where none were before).

Always using the file system encoding (instead of the
default encoding) but leaving the return type might be
considered a bug fix. It also might be considered a new
feature: you can now do things you couldn't before.