Message5677

We just can't change objects that are expected to be str to unicode because they're incompatible in certain situations -- when you combine unicode with non-ascii strs you end up with UnicodeDecodeErrors. 

Consider a value somehow created from or combined with part of the argv that a developer assumes is a str -- with this change it would become unicode. If that value is combined with a non-ascii str in some later part of his codebase a mysterious UnicodeDecodeError is raised. 

Furthermore tracking down what the cause of that the error was can be really painful