Can't attach to paramiko based ssh/sftp

I have a ticket for this: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-24082

I'm developing a container hosting platform, part of which is being able to ssh/sftp into containers. This is implemented using paramiko (which has been wonderful to work with). My problem is that PyCharm always reports the remote interpreter as being 'unknown' and cannot fill the 'installed packages' table.

The commands issued by PyCharm...

• env "JETBRAINS_REMOTE_RUN"="1" "PYTHONUNBUFFERED"="1" /usr/bin/python -V
• env "JETBRAINS_REMOTE_RUN"="1" "PYTHONUNBUFFERED"="1" /usr/bin/python /.pycharm_helpers/packaging_tool.py list

Both return the correct results. I went through a stage where tabs were being rendered into spaces and can now get bit-exact replies but this has made no difference. I also stopped the sftp server from reporting '0' as uid/gid and presenting as 'root' ... again, to no avail.

Ummm, this is really bad news for me. I'm (continually) late as hell and I want to demo remote debugging but this, quite possibly tiny, problem is preventing me from being able to do so. I also have a website to port and that's being hard to fix for the same reason :)

I'd absolutely love it if someone could pick this up and run with it ... I'm trying to make something that makes your software look cool (and essential)...