Hmmm, then that says that the root problem is actually things not being translated to unicode when ingested. An alternative is [`binary`](https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/develop/pip/backwardcompat/__init__.py#L36) but that has only been written for `ascii` codec at the moment. It'd be possible to give it an optional argument for codec, but this is still the "ad-hoc patch it up as you find it" method of fixing python unicode. It's always preferable to fix the problems at their source.