Issue #17429: platform.linux_distribution() now decodes files from the UTF-8

encoding with the surrogateescape error handler, instead of decoding from the
locale encoding in strict mode. It fixes the function on Fedora 19 which is
probably the first major distribution release with a non-ASCII name. Patch
written by Toshio Kuratomi.

Lib/platform.py

@@ -129,6 +129,10 @@ except AttributeError:
         # Standard Unix uses /dev/null
         DEV_NULL = '/dev/null'
 
+# Directory to search for configuration information on Unix.
+# Constant used by test_platform to test linux_distribution().
+_UNIXCONFDIR = '/etc'
+
 ### Platform specific APIs
 
 _libc_search = re.compile(b'(__libc_init)'
@@ -315,7 +319,7 @@ def linux_distribution(distname='', version='', id='',
 
     """
     try:
-        etc = os.listdir('/etc')
+        etc = os.listdir(_UNIXCONFDIR)
     except os.error:
         # Probably not a Unix system
         return distname,version,id
@@ -331,7 +335,8 @@ def linux_distribution(distname='', version='', id='',
         return _dist_try_harder(distname,version,id)
 
     # Read the first line
-    with open('/etc/'+file, 'r') as f:
+    with open(os.path.join(_UNIXCONFDIR, file), 'r',
+              encoding='utf-8', errors='surrogateescape') as f:
         firstline = f.readline()
     _distname, _version, _id = _parse_release_file(firstline)