The overload of type was happening due to the unprefix stuff in fs.py. Red
herring, though interesting.
I distilled the failure down to this foo.py program. Of interest is that
"import builtins" succeeds on a Python 2.5 system. It should be throwing
unless Python is v3. So there's a builtins package hiding in this system
somewhere.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# test subversion-python bug revealed by mailer.py
import tempfile as _tempfile
import builtins
tempfile = _tempfile.mktemp()
print tempfile
#print sys.version
fp = builtins.open(tempfile, 'w+')
print type(fp)
chunk = ""
print type(chunk)
fp.write(chunk)
fp.close()
