Comment 3 for bug 197219

This slightly broke a development box of mine a few months ago. I didn't look into it until now because it just caused some weirdness occassionally (my sitecustomize.py does some fiddling with encoding & locales to ensure cross-platform homogeneity which only usually affects corner cases in my application).

I'm not sure how it could be ever considered a good idea to effectively disable sitecustomize.py from site-python for everyone, by putting this in python's main lib directory. And even worse than a bad idea, it's non-standard.

I'm sad to see how old this bug report is that that it seems nothing has been done about it.

Luckily my production servers run on FreeBSD so this did not effect them.

It seems there is little to no official documentation about sitecustomize.py that I can find to provide any official guidelines. My personal understanding of sitecustomize.py is similar to the original reporter of this bug. The main references on the internet to it is the very popular http://diveintopython.org/xml_processing/unicode.html which suggests (somewhat controversially) using it in site-python: he'll need to make a footnote that this technique will work everywhere except *ubuntu.