[Distutils] PEP 376 comments

[Sridhar Ratnakumar]

On 09-06-08 02:58 AM, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>> >
>> >  * Should the PEP specify the encoding of text-files? PEP314 doesn't seem to specify the encoding of PKG-INFO files, which can cause problems when a field contains data that isn't ASCII.
>
> The encoding used is utf-8 since 2.6.  I think we should rather update
> PEP 314, and mention it in the upcoming PEP 345 as well,

For the python-wifi-0.3.1 package, I noticed that PKG-INFO uses 'latin1' 
encoding.

 > grep Author python_wifi.egg-info/PKG-INFO | head -n 1
Author: R�man Joost

 > grep Author python_wifi.egg-info/PKG-INFO | hexdump -C | head -n 1
00000000  41 75 74 68 6f 72 3a 20  52 f3 6d 61 6e 20 4a 6f  |Author: 
R.man Jo|

Note: latin1 uses "f3", while utf-8 uses "c3 b3".


The reason for not using utf-8 in PKG-INFO is perhaps due to the 
presence of "# -*- coding: latin1 -*-" in setup.py. Cf. PEP 0263

Indeed, even 'python setup.py --author' sends latin1 encoded bytes (not 
utf-8).