non-trivial merge failures

Every time I try to do a non-trivial merge, I always get this:

davem@sunset:~/src/GIT/net-2.6$ git pull git://git.skbuff.net/gitroot/yoshfuji/linux-2.6.14+advapi-fix/
Unpacking 21 objects
 100% (21/21) done
Trying really trivial in-index merge...
fatal: Merge requires file-level merging
Nope.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/davem/bin/git-merge-recursive", line 13, in ?
    from gitMergeCommon import *
  File "/home/davem/share/git-core/python/gitMergeCommon.py", line 18, in ?
    import subprocess
ImportError: No module named subprocess
Automatic merge failed/prevented; fix up by hand
davem@sunset:~/src/GIT/net-2.6$ 

(one can reproduce this exact tree state by cloning:
	master.kernel.org:/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-2.6.git
 then executing the above pull command)

Maybe something is wrong with my python installation or something like that?

It looks like it's failing to import some python module called "subprocess", and I aparently don't have that installed. /usr/bin/python on this Debian box is aparently python-2.3, do I need to be using python-2.4 for this merge stuff to work?