There was a change in this PR to the way stderr is patched that caused cpplint to throw an error in python2 and python3:

sys.stderr = codecs.StreamReader(sys.stderr, codecs.getreader('utf8'), codecs.getwriter('utf8'), 'replace')

I checked out the codecs documentation and it didn't seem valid so I removed it. Not sure if you were looking at the StreamReaderWriter docs instead, but let me know if I'm missing something here.

I see, that's part of d3d4380. I wanted to restore similarity to the google codebase. It should work for Python2, not Python3. Also see google/styleguide@b511d7d