I found a Redhat bug that seems to be related:
  https://bugzilla.redha t.com/show_bug.cgi?id=758446
(It's for a different Python program, but pycurl is used there, too, and in it 
NaNs are similarly showing up in unexpected places.)

In comment #9,  Zdeněk Pavlas suggests the problem might related to improper 
cleanup after the use of MMX instructions, as explained in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2#Differences_between_MMX_and_SSE2

"Once MMX has been used, the programmer must use the emms instruction
(C: _mm_empty()) to restore operation to the x87 register file. [...]
the corrupt floating-point state caused by failure to emit emms may go
undetected for millions of instructions before ultimately causing the
floating-point routine to fail, returning NaN."

I'm not sure how to verify that issue is actually what's triggering this
specific problem, but the Wikipedia page goes on to mention that this
cleanup is not required when SSE2 instructions are used instead of MMX,
and I can confirm that the two machines I have found that exhibit this
problem do have "mmx" but not "sse2" in the flags line of /proc/cpuinfo.

However, I have some other machine with that same combo of flags which
don't show the bug, so it seems that the libXXX versions involved do
matter.  In my case, at least, the systems that do show the the bug are
running Precise, and the ones that don't are running Lucid and Debian
Etch.

If this "missing emms instruction" is in fact the problem, I'm also not
sure exactly which library needs to be fixed (though the fact that it's
https that triggers the problem might point towards libgnutls26...).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1063350

Title:
  add-apt-repository/apt-add-repository fails with "ValueError: cannot
  convert float NaN to integer"

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