Fixing deprecation warnings for Python 2.6

[Felix Schwarz]

There is a bug report about deprecation warnings in 2.6 which is left in
some kind of limbo state since two months:
http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/8160

It was fixed in r7774 but reverted in r7775 with the commit message
"Revert parts of [7774] since it broke our exception handling."

So what is the plan to go forward with that bug? If I fix the
deprecation warning and fix all failing tests, is that probably a clean
fix? Or is there some hidden, untested code which breaks there?

fs