At 02:47 PM 2/24/2007 -0600, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

I have created a setup.py file for distirbution and I bumped into a small bug when i tried to set my name in the contact field (Tarek Ziadé)

Using string (utf8 file):

setup( maintainer="Tarek Ziadé" )

leads to:

File ".../lib/python2.5/distutils/command/register.py", line 162, in send_metadata auth) File ".../lib/python2.5/distutils/command/register.py", line 257, in post_to_server value = unicode(value).encode("utf-8") UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 10: ordinal not in range(128)

Using unicode:

setup( maintainer=u"Tarek Ziadé" )

leads to:

File ".../lib/python2.5/distutils/dist.py", line 1094, in write_pkg_file file.write('Author: %s\n' % self.get_contact() ) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 18: ordinal not in range(128)

I would propose a patch for this problem but i don't know what would be the best input (i guess unicode for names)

At 05:45 PM 2/24/2007 -0500, Tres Seaver wrote:

Don't you still need to tell Python about the encoding of your string literals [1] [2] ? E.g.::

That's not the problem, it's that the code that writes the PKG-INFO file doesn't handle Unicode. See distutils.dist.DistributionMetadata.write_pkg_info(). It needs to use a file with encoding support, if it's doing unicode However, there's currently no standard, as far as I know, for what encoding the PKG-INFO file should use. Meanwhile, the 'register' command accepts Unicode, but is broken in handling it. Essentially, the problem is that Python 2.5 broke this by adding a unicode *requirement* to the "register" command. Previously, register simply sent whatever you gave it, and the PKG-INFO writing code still does. Unfortunately, this means that there is no longer any one value that you can use for your name that will be accepted by both "register" and anything that writes a PKG-INFO file. Both register and write_pkg_info() are arguably broken here, and should be able to work with either strings or unicode, and degrade gracefully in the event of non-ASCII characters in a string. (Because even though "register" is only run by the package's author, users may run other commands that require a PKG-INFO, so a package prepared using Python <2.5 must still be usable with Python 2.5 distutils, and Python <2.5 allows 8-bit maintainer names.) Unfortunately, this isn't fixable until there's a new 2.5.x release. For previous Python versions, both register and write_pkg_info() accepted 8-bit strings and passed them on as-is, so the only workaround for this issue at the moment is to revert to Python 2.4 or less.