Message 65189 - Python tracker

You can't change the codec - it's being used in other places as well,
e.g. for use cases where you need to have a 7-bit encoded readable
version of a Unicode object.

Adding a new codec would be fine, though I don't know how this would map
raw Unicode strings with non-ASCII characters in them to an 8-bit
string. Perhaps this is not needed at all in Py3k.