[Python-3000] setup.py fails in the py3k-struni branch

[Guido van Rossum]

On 6/7/07, Alexandre Vassalotti <alexandre at peadrop.com> wrote:
> On 6/7/07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> > It's time to look at the original traceback (attached as "tb", after
> > fixing the formatting problems). it looks like any call to
> > encodings.normalize_encoding() causes this problem.
>
> Don't know if it will help to know that, but it seems adding a
> debugging print() in the normalize_encoding method, makes Python act
> weird:
>
>   >>> print("hello")  # no output
>   [38357 refs]
>   >>> hello?          # note the exception is not shown
>   [30684 refs]
>   >>> exit()          # does quit

That's a bootstrapping issue. normalize_encoding() is apparently
called in order to set up stdin/stdout/stderr, so it shouldn't attempt
to touch those (or raise errors).

> > I don't know why linking an extension avoids this, and why it's only
> > a problem for you and not for me, but that's probably a locale
> > setting (if you mail me the values of all your locale-specific
> > environment variables I can try to reproduce it).
>
> I don't think it is related to locales settings. Since even with a
> minimum number of environment variables, I still can reproduce the
> problem.
>
>   % sh
>   $ for v in `set | egrep -v 'OPTIND|PS|PATH' | cut -d "=" -f1`
>   > do unset $v; done
>   $ make
>   make: *** [sharedmods] Error 1

Well, then it is up to you to come up with a hypothesis for why it
doesn't happen on my system. (I tried the above thing and it still
works.)

> > The trail leads back to the optparse module using the gettext module
> > to translate its error messages. That seems overengineered to me,
> > but I won't argue too strongly.
> >
> > In any case, the root cause is that normalize_encoding() is badly
> > broken. I've attached a hack that might fix it. Can you try if that
> > helps?
>
> Yep, that worked. What this new str8 type is for, btw? It is the second
> time I encounter it, today.

It is the temporary new name for the old 8-bit str type. The plan is
to rename unicode->str and delete the old str type, but in the short
term that doesn't quite work because there is too much C code that
requires 8-bit strings (and can't be made to work with the bytes type
either). So for the time being I've renamed the old str type to str8
rather than deleting it altogether. Once we have things 99% working
tis way we'll make another pass to get rid of str8 completely -- or
perhaps keep it around under some other name with reduced
functionality (since there have been requests for an immutable bytes
type).

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)