We're seeing this error in Launchpad trying to use the maverick psycopg package; it appears that something has changed in a way that isn't sensible for python2 (which has no bytes type and is badly broken at disambiguating strings and bytes).
If its at all possible, I think it would be very sensible to revert this change before Maverick releases, because so far in terms of database using programs - storm was affected, Launchpad is affected, I fully expect nearly every app to be affected, and the fixes will often be massive and intrusive (and need undoing for Python3 anyway because u'' is not valid in Python3.)
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: python-psycopg2 (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.33-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Sep 29 15:15:04 2010
ProcEnviron:
LANGUAGE=la_AU:tlh_GB:tlh:en
PATH=(custom, user)
LANG=la_AU.utf8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: psycopg2
Is it possible to have a an example reproducing the problem?
The failing comparison reported in the error message is one performed by postgres, not by python, and it shouldn't be anything concerning unicode strings. I think it is related to a change committed before Psycopg 2.2.0 where the binary adapter started adding a ::bytea to disambiguate the type and make it work where the context is not explicit, e.g. in function calls or in arrays.
Psycopg has now a bug tracker again: http://