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xmlrpclib uses datetime.strftime which cannot handle dates before 1900.
this patch adds a custom date formatting function, which does not have
this restriction. It also contains 2 additional unit tests, which both
fail with the unpatched version.

Does your patch also work on systems which don't allow negative values
for time_t?

Well, all it basically does is changing calls to obj.strftime to a
custom string formatting function (where obj is a datetime.datetime,
datetime.date or datetime.time). These strftime calls are made during
object marshalling. So, all the objects to be marshalled are created by
the program itself. The datetime module allows those dates to be
created, so I think it should be safe. 
The unmarshalling code did not change, so it's possible to receive a
date before 1900, but not to send it back...
But to answer your question. I don't know, I don't even know a platform,
which use an unsigned time_t.

http://bugs.python.org/issue1777412 describes the cause of this issue
(i.e. strftime not being able to handle years before 1900).

Attaching an updated version of the patch against trunk revision 61011.

guido says it's ok to fix the issue in xmlrpclib only:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-April/078396.html
I'm also attaching a dummy.diff in order to have a patch keyword...
If someone is willing to commit this, I'll check if it still applies to
trunk and maybe update the diff.

working on it

Checked in on trunk as r62378. Will let the normal 3.0 merge process
suck it over to the py3k branch.

Skip, thanks for handling this.