Problem reported running on Ubuntu 12.04

[dtalayco]

A user reports hitting an error running the test target under Ubuntu 12.04, Python 2.7.3. The problem comes when running the field.py unit test which reports an unpack error on line 91 of field.py.

This may be a known issue with this version of Python. See:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20612587/struct-unpack-with-bytearrays

Current work around is to upgrade Python or use Ubuntu 14.04.

[naclomi]

I'm not sure if this has unintended side-effects, but it appears that you can cast the bytearrays to strs when passing them to struct functions to avoid this bug. According to random person on the internet (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9099145/where-are-python-bytearrays-used), the biggest real difference is that strings are immutable. This should be fine.

I have a copy of Python 2.7.3 compiled locally if you want to test any other workarounds.