Without python-codecs, python-json is broken. Whenever you import the module in Python, you'll get the following error: >>> import json Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 108, in <module> from .decoder import JSONDecoder File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 24, in <module> NaN, PosInf, NegInf = _floatconstants() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 18, in _floatconstants _BYTES = '7FF80000000000007FF0000000000000'.decode('hex') LookupError: no codec search functions registered: can't find encoding The problem is that part of the JSON initialization code try to use the HEX codec. This issue goes away if you also install python-codecs. python-2.7-manifest.inc should probably be re-generated with this RDEPENDS for python-json.
Magnus, can you send a tested patch?
Sure, I have posted a patch to http://patches.openembedded.org/patch/84475/ It applies a fix to Python v2.7. Python v3 might suffer from the same issue, but since Python 3 (core) doesn't seem to function at all without python3-codecs, it's probably something that will be addressed by #6967.
Fix, also python3 was indeed fixed by #6967 http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=2b945a95444b722ac97c78783dd82f8d65b0254e