Comment 1 for bug 1522916

argh, so paramiko has this gem:

def asbytes(s):
    if not isinstance(s, bytes_types):
        if isinstance(s, string_types):
            s = b(s)
        else:
            try:
                s = s.asbytes()
            except Exception:
                raise Exception('Unknown type')
    return s

Which means that if "asbytes()" raises exceptions for one reason or another, like "Exception: Unknown type <SFTPAttributes: [ size=16 uid=1000 gid=1000 mode=0100644 atime=1449250574 mtime=1449250574 ]>: UnicodeDecodeError('ascii', '-rw-r--r-- 1 1000 1000 16 04 d\xc3\xa9c 17:36 ', 46, 47, 'ordinal not in range(128)')" it gets silently hidden :(