ascii mergerepo error in local koji instance

[Josh Boyer]

I'm seeing this error when trying to do a newRepo task on my local
koji server, using rawhide as an external repo:

2101/14674 - python-decoratortools-1.7-4.fc12.noarch
2102/14674 - ruby-atk-0.19.1-2.fc12.ppc
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/libexec/kojid/mergerepos", line 241, in <module>
    main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/libexec/kojid/mergerepos", line 236, in main
    merge.write_metadata()
  File "/usr/libexec/kojid/mergerepos", line 216, in write_metadata
    mdgen.doPkgMetadata()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/createrepo/__init__.py", line
364, in doPkgMetadata
    self.writeMetadataDocs(packages)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/createrepo/__init__.py", line
527, in writeMetadataDocs
    self.primaryfile.write(po.xml_dump_primary_metadata())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 1015,
in xml_dump_primary_metadata
    msg += misc.to_unicode(self._dump_format_items())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 894,
in _dump_format_items
    msg += self._dump_pco('provides')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 919,
in _dump_pco
    msg += pcostring
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xec in position
28: ordinal not in range(128)
[root at koji 97]#

The builders and hub are all running a fully updated F11.  This is the
first newRepo task after the repo addition, so it's all purely from
rawhide.

I see that there was a similar report of this in the past, but I don't
see a resolution?  Is there a patch I need to apply, or do I have to
block the erroring packages in koji, or?

Help would be appreciated.  (I'm also confused why the main koji
instance isn't hitting this).

josh