Description of problem:
after installing a large number of updates, yum fails with:

Error: You must not use 8-bit bytestrings unless you use a text_factory that can interpret 8-bit bytestrings (like text_factory = str). It is highly recommended that you instead just switch your application to Unicode strings.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. yum clean all
2. yum list updates
3. yum update a*
  
Actual results:
error message above

Expected results:
update packages beginning with "a"

Additional info:

not sorted out yet, more later. may be locale, will look for .rpmnew in /etc/yum.