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Fair enough. Seems kinda related to https://bugs.python.org/issue30458 -- looks like it was a fun one ;-)
I think either approach would work for me; my existing work-around doesn't preclude either, particularly since I want it purely for testing purposes.
For a bit of context, I work on a large-ish project (few hundred kloc if you include tests) that recently finished porting from python 2.7 to 3.6 & 3.7. As part of that process I discovered https://bugs.python.org/issue33973 and worked around it in https://github.com/openstack/swift/commit/93b49c5. That was a prerequisite for running tests under py2 against a server running py3, but this bug complicated us running the *tests* under py3 as well. I eventually landed on https://github.com/openstack/swift/commit/c0ae48b as a work-around.
I could probably take another stab at a fix if you like, though I'm not entirely sure when I'll get to it at the moment.