sys.setdefaultencoding

[Robin Becker]

Can someone explain the rationale of making the default encoding a sitewide setting?

I could live with the the default being set on a per process basis, but it 
baffles me why even that possibility is taken away as site.py removes 
sys.setdefaultencoding.

Is there a way to allow the process to specify that unicode-->str should use 
'utf8' rather than 'ascii' in all non-specific cases?
-- 
Robin Becker