[Distutils] distutils: upload fails if maintainer name is unicode

[Sébastien Barthélemy]

Hello,

when I run "python setup.py sdist upload" on my package, it fails with
the following traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 86, in <module>
    cmdclass=cmdclass)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/core.py",
line 152, in setup
    dist.run_commands()
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/dist.py",
line 987, in run_commands
    self.run_command(cmd)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/dist.py",
line 1007, in run_command
    cmd_obj.run()
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/command/upload.py",
line 57, in run
    self.upload_file(command, pyversion, filename)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/distutils/command/upload.py",
line 135, in upload_file
    value = str(value)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in
position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

I'm running Python 2.6.4 on mac os X. Note also that I could register
the package on pypi without any problem.

Apparently, the problem occurs because of the
maintainer=u'Sébastien BARTHÉLEMY' argument to the setup command.

This seems to be a known problem :
 http://bugs.python.org/issue1076233
 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1162338/whats-the-right-way-to-use-unicode-metadata-in-setup-py

If I read well, it should be fixed in 2.6. Can you confirm this
problem is (at least officially) fixed for python 2.6.4 ? Any idea or
workaround ?

Thanks

Sébastien