Checkpoint.  Manipulated things so that string literals are always
unicode, and a few other compensating changes, e.g. str <- unicode,
chr <- unichr, and repr() of a unicode string no longer starts
with 'u'.  Lots of unit tests are broken, but some basic things
work, in particular distutils works so the extensions can be built,
and test_builtin.py works.
diff --git a/Lib/distutils/command/install.py b/Lib/distutils/command/install.py
index c03a90e..cc92e96 100644
--- a/Lib/distutils/command/install.py
+++ b/Lib/distutils/command/install.py
@@ -463,7 +463,7 @@
             self.extra_path = self.distribution.extra_path
 
         if self.extra_path is not None:
-            if type(self.extra_path) is StringType:
+            if isinstance(self.extra_path, basestring):
                 self.extra_path = self.extra_path.split(',')
 
             if len(self.extra_path) == 1: