I consider the limitation of package names to non-ascii to be a blessing in
disguise.  In python3, unicode module names are possible but not portable
between systems.  This is because the non-ascii module names inside of a python
file are abstract text but the representation on the filesystem is whatever
the user's locale is.  The consensus on python-dev when this was brought up
seemed to be that using non-ascii in your local locale was important for
learning to use python.  But distributing non-ascii modules to other people
was a bad idea.  (If you have the attention span for long threads,
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2011-January/107467.html
Note that the threading was broken several times but the subject line stayed
the same.)


Description of the non-ascii module problem for people who want a summary:

I have a python3 program that has::
  #!/usr/bin/python3 -tt
  # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  import café
  café.do_something()

python3 reads this file in and represents café as an abstract text type
because I wrote it using utf-8 encoding and it can therefore decode the
file's contents to its internal representation.  However it then has to find
the café module on disk.  In my environment, I have LC_ALL=en_US.utf8.
python3 finds the file café.py and uses that to satisfy the import.

However, I have a colleague that does work with me.  He has access to my
program over a shared filesystem (or distributed to him via a git checkout
or copied via an sdist, etc).  His locale uses latin-1 (ISO8859-1) as his
encoding (For instance, LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-1).  When he runs my program,
python3 is still able to read the application file itself (due to the piece
of the file that specifies it's encoded in utf-8) but when it searches for
a file to satisfy café on the disk it runs into probelsm because the café.py
filename is not encoded using latin-1.