I think test_quopri is too latin-1 centric.
Strictly speaking, there is nothing latin-1 centric in test_quopri.py whatsoever.
For instance, on my Mac, Python source is in MacRoman encoding. CVS knows all about this, so it happily converts the latin-1-upsidedown-exclam to a macroman-upsidedown-exclam, and if I look at the source code I see the same glyph as I see on Unix.
This is the problem. Python source code is not in Latin-1; bytes inside strings and comments are "as-is". So the CVS "binary" mode would come closer as to how python files should be treated, although you'd still would want to convert line-endings.
I'm surprised the test doesn't fail on Windows as well, or do Windows pythonistas generally work with source in latin1?
Most of these people probably use code page 1252, which is identical to latin-1 except in the range 0x80 to 0x9f. For test_quopri.py, the best thing would be to replace the characters outside range(128) to \x escaped ones, to avoid the problem with Mac CVS (which really is the problem here - if you unpack Python from the source distribution, the test should pass fine on your system). Regards, Martin