r80137 (PEP 3147) introduced a test in test_site. The test fails on non-ASCII directory because stdout uses ASCII whereas the directories contains non-ASCII characters. http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/builders/AMD64 Ubuntu wide 3.x/builds/848 Attached patch is a workaround to this issue. The path is encoded to ASCII using backslashreplace error handler. But the patch is not perfect, it should use the reverse operation to get the path as an unicode string. But I don't know how to implement the reverse operation of .encode("ascii", "backslashreplace").