Message 206071 - Python tracker
There's an alternative to trying to force a different encoding for the standard streams when the OS claims ASCII as the OS encoding: we can default to surrogateescape as the error handler, on the assumption that whatever the *real* OS encoding is, it definitely isn't ASCII. That means we'll still complain about displaying improperly encoded data when the OS suggests a plausible encoding, but we won't fail entirely just because someone enabled (deliberately or accidentally) the POSIX locale.