Re: [gentoo-dev] Locale check in python_pkg_setup()

[Brian Harring]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 09:49:21AM -0700, "Paweee Hajdan, Jr." wrote:
> On 7/29/10 8:48 PM, Brian Harring wrote:
> > It's basically annoying people into changing to partially
> > sidestep a couple of bugs, instead of fixing the issue- and that's the
> > wrong course of action.
>
> I think that with python earlier than python-3 unicode handling is quite
> complicated, and I'm not surprised there are problems with that.

encoding handling wasn't that bad under py2k.  Py3k just enforces the 
boundaries- meaning you can't just skid by.

> Arfrever, does python-3 have the same problem with non-UTF8 locales?

ascii is a subset of utf-8 and ascii is a subset of latin-1; latin-1 
and utf-8 aren't compatible in encoded form however.

What this means is that the same set of bugs I ran down still will go 
boom if you have a utf-8 locale and the code in question was dealing 
w/ a latin-1 encoded file.


> Another thing we can consider is making UTF8 the default setup in
> Gentoo. I think most people (including me) don't care whether it's C or
> UTF8 as long as it works.

"as long as it works" in this case means "fix the code" as I've laid 
out.  Forcing locale's to sidestep it leaves the latin-1/utf8 
incompatibility to go 'boom'.

Basically, forcing utf8 doesn't "make it work".  It reduces the cases 
breakage will show up while leaving those issues still there- frankly 
this is worse, can't fix those screwups without them breaking (for 
better or worse, and preferably breaking in a testcase).  We've got 4 
bugs, and only one of them is semi complex fix (dodcutils needs to 
require that html it's fed is utf8 compatible- valid enough req 
anyways since html shouldn't be latin-1, it should be ascii or utf8).

So.. get fixing, instead of dodging the work imo. ;)

~brian