This error occurs while listing files associated with a given commit. On a Fedora-17 machine with GitPython-0.3.2-0.2.RC1.fc17.noarch.

-> https://git.kernel.org/linus/ad3e2751e7c546ae678be1f8d86e898506b42cef

$ python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Jul 24 2012, 10:05:38)

from git import repo
rp = repo.Repo('~/linux/")
cm = rp.commit("ad3e2751e7")

cm.stats.files.keys()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/git/objects/commit.py", line 217, in stats
if not self.parents:
File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/gitdb/util.py", line 238, in getattr
self.set_cache(attr)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/git/objects/commit.py", line 132, in set_cache
self._deserialize(StringIO(stream.read()))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/git/objects/commit.py", line 443, in _deserialize
self.author.name = self.author.name.decode(self.encoding)
LookupError: unknown encoding: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----