gissf1

@pytony Thanks for the official patch!  I installed appi-0.1.9999 (post-0.1.6, pre-0.1.7), and everything worked out of the box (without additional patching), so I would call that a fix!
Also, in case it wasn't evident to others on this thread, I'm using Python 3.4 at the moment, so it absolutely can work with Python 3.4.

@cardinal
Thanks for that strace, that did help alot!
I noticed one major difference while initializing.  It seems that on my system its using:
/usr/lib/python-exec/python3.4/../../../lib64/python3.4/encodings/ascii.py and on your system its using:
/usr/lib/python-exec/python3.4/../../../lib64/python3.4/encodings/utf_8.py Using ascii instead of utf_8 in python is not completely unexpected on my system since I try to avoid building anything outside en_US locale with ISO-8859-1 encoding.
Later, (on both yours and mine) it reads the file:
/var/git/meta-repo/kits/core-kit/profiles/base/make.defaults In that file, it finds non-ascii (code points >0x7e) characters in the file contents as part of a utf-8 sequence in one of the first author's names in a comment, and mine dies immediately after, because the python ascii parser does not attempt to handle any extended characters and throws exceptions instead.
So this brings up the next question of why my system is using ascii instead of utf_8.  I do have utf-8 support enabled in some places, and I have the referenced "utf_8.py" file (the one yours loaded earlier) in my system, but it's not choosing to load it for some reason.
I guess I'll dig in deeper and see where the rabbit hole leads.  Thanks again cardinal!

Upgrade to ego-2.2.1, and you should now have:
# ego kit show # ego kit list You should also be able to do a "man ego.conf" and learn about how to set the branch of the kits you want to use.