[Distutils] PEP 517 - specifying build system in pyproject.toml

[Nick Coghlan]

On 22 May 2017 at 21:02, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22 May 2017 at 11:22, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
>> I have made a PR against the PEP with my best take on the encoding
>> situation:
>> https://github.com/python/peps/pull/264/files
>
> LGTM.
>
> The only reservation I have is that the choice of UTF-8 means that on
> Windows, build backends pretty much have to explicitly manage tool
> output (as they are pretty much certain *not* to output in UTF-8).
> Build backend writers that aren't aware of this issue (most likely
> because their main platform is not Windows) could very easily choose
> to just pass through the raw bytes, and as a result *all* non-ASCII
> output would be garbled on non-UTF-8 systems.
>
> Would locale.getpreferredencoding() not be a better choice here? I
> know it has issues in some situations on Unix, but are they worse than
> the issues UTF-8 would cause on Windows? After all it's the encoding
> used by subprocess.Popen in "universal newlines" mode...

+1 from me for locale.getpreferredencoding() as the default - not only
is it a more suitable default on Windows, it's also the best way to do
the right thing in GB.18030 locales, and as far as I'm aware, handling
that correctly is still a requirement for selling commercial software
into China (that's why I chose it as the main non-UTF-8 example
encoding in PEP 538).

If Python tools want to specifically detect the use of 7-bit ASCII and
override *that* to be UTF-8, then the relevant snippet is:

    def get_stream_encoding():
        nominal = locale.getpreferredencoding()
        if codecs.lookup(nominal).name == "ascii":
            return "utf-8"
        return nominal

That's effectively the same model that PEP 538 and 540 are proposing
be applied by default for the standard streams, so it would also
interoperate well with Python 3.7+.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia