XMLGenerator.startElementNS bug - how to escalate?

[Nikolai Grigoriev]

Dear all,

what is the process to escalate bugs in Python core libraries? I am
interested in one specific bug - that of xml/sax/saxutils.py,
XMLGenerator.startElementNS(). The method is completely
unusable, as it crashes on empty-namespace attributes (making
me wonder if its author ever tested it - most XML attributes
in the wild are unprefixed, aren't they?). As a result, we're left
without any namespace-aware SAX serializer in the core library,
which is not good.

What puzzles me is that the bug is reported 1.5+ years ago (#847665
in the SourceForge bug tracker), and a fix is attached to the issue
in the tracker. Several versions of Python have been released since
then, but the issue is still open, and the problem is still there. What
else is needed for the patch to find its way into the standard
distribution? Can I help pushing it there?

Regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev