Comment 8 for bug 816169

This doesn't make much sense. First, afaict the installed encodings/__init__.py looks just fine. A little ugly, but legal syntax. Also, the md5sum of my installed version exactly matches upstream's current Python 2.7 version, and I see nothing relevant in the upstream tracker.

The Py_Initialize bit in the traceback is also odd. Are there any extension modules involved here? This smells suspiciously like a reference counting bug that is triggering a traceback in unrelated Python code. What third party (i.e. not part of Python) code is involved here?

Any possibility you can boil the problem down to something small and reproducible?