germinate crashed with UnicodeDecodeError in _parse_package(): 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)

The python3 version of germinate fails with a Unicode error when invoked on the livefs buildd for daily-preinstall image generation. It appears this is because it's running in a C locale. Reproducible with this commandline:

LANG=C germinate --no-rdepends --no-installer -S http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/seeds/ -m http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ -d quantal -s ubuntu.quantal -c main -a armhf

ProblemType: Crash
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: germinate 2.9
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-4.4-generic 3.5.0-rc6
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-4-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.3-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 017452a27eca3c8b498abbfa5ef91db9
CheckboxSystem: ecaaad6fa1e0799a0aa1126bf620f39e
Date: Tue Jul 17 11:22:43 2012
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/germinate
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100816.1)
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python3.2mu
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcCmdline: /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/germinate --no-rdepends --no-installer -S http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/seeds/ -m http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/ -d quantal -s ubuntu.quantal -c main -a armhf
PythonArgs: ['/usr/bin/germinate', '--no-rdepends', '--no-installer', '-S', 'http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/seeds/', '-m', 'http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/', '-d', 'quantal', '-s', 'ubuntu.quantal', '-c', 'main', '-a', 'armhf']
SourcePackage: germinate
Title: germinate crashed with UnicodeDecodeError in _parse_package(): 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-06-11 (36 days ago)
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout libvirtd lpadmin mythtv plugdev sambashare src sudo