Jean-Yves, please understand that no amount of discussion can likely
change Guido's or my view on this patch. We both fully understand the
relevance of OS/390, and *still* reject it, for the reasons discussed.

Besides, integration into 2.5.1 is not possible, as it would violate our
maintenance policy of not integrating new features into bug fix (2.x.y)
releases. Integrating it into 2.6 might be possibly technically, but
could be a waste of time since 2.x will shortly (i.e. within a few
years) reach the end of its life. I doubt that the patch as it stands
will work correctly on 3.x (as *that* stands).

As you seem to be proposing that supporting EBCDIC will be "easy", just
try to port the patch to 3.x to see how this assumption is wrong. In
Python 3.x, Python source code *cannot* be interpreted as EBCDIC,
without an encoding declaration, since the language specification says
that the source code is UTF-8; there is no room for platform-specific
derivations from that default. Also consider Guido's discussion of the
networking code; unless you can report that httplib and ftplib work
correctly, I doubt that the port is really complete.

So I think the only choice is to maintain this port outside of the
Python source tree, for a few more years. If you plan to contribute it
again to the Python core some day, please keep track of all the
individual contributors, as we will then require copyright agreements
from everyone.