[Linux-SIG] PEP 538: Coercing the legacy C locale to C.UTF-8

[Nick Coghlan]

Hi folks,

I have a new PEP up for a change I originally suggested as a downstream
patch for Fedora (now that we ship a C.UTF-8 locale by default):
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0538/

I won't post the whole thing here (since a lot of it is background on the C
locale system in general, as well as various things we've tried in the
past), and instead will just summarise the specific technical changes I'm
proposing:

* in Py_Initialize, emit a warning on stderr regarding limited Unicode
compatibility if we detect that LC_CTYPE is set to the "C" locale
* in Programs/python.c (i.e. the C level main() implementation), set LANG
and LC_ALL in the environment to "C.UTF-8" if we detect that the locale is
otherwise set to "C"
* skip the coercion if PYTHONALLOWCLOCALE is set so developers running in
recent system Python versions with this implemented can still debug
problems that only show up in older Python 3.x releases, or in embedding
applications that still use the C locale
* grant a priori permission to redistributors to backport this to older
versions (as we'd like to include the change in the Fedora system Python
for F26, which will be based on Python 3.6.0)

I'm posting it here to ask if anyone sees potential deal-breakers for other
non-Fedora-derived distros before I post it to python-dev for review.

Cheers,
Nick.

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