In pycodestyle 2.1.0, E305 was introduced, which requires two blank
lines after top level declarations, too.
See https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/issues/400
See also #10689; thanks @stepshal for first mentioning this issue and
initial patches
From now on, the line
from __future__ import unicode_literals
should be contained in every single Python file lest we run into any more 2.x/3.x issues.
Going forward, we're likely to develop on 3.x only and would likely miss subtle bugs otherwise.
dirkf