[Python-Dev] deleting setdefaultencoding iin site.py is evil

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Chris Withers wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Would anyone object if I removed the deletion of of
> sys.setdefaultencoding in site.py?
> 
> I'm guessing "yes!" so thought I'd state my reasons now:
> 
> This deletion appears to be pretty flimsy; reload(sys) and you have it
> back. Which is lucky, because I need it after it's been deleted...
> 
> Why? Well, because you can no longer put sitecustomize.py in a
> project-specific location (http://bugs.python.org/issue1734860) and
> because for some projects the only way I can deal with encoded strings
> sensibly is to use setdefaultencoding, in my case at the start of a
> script generated by zc.buildout's zc.recipe.egg (I *know* all the
> encodings in this project are utf-8, but I don't want to go playing
> whack-a-mole with whatever modules this rather large project uses that
> haven't been made properly unicode aware).
> 
> Yes, it needs to be used as early as possible, and the docs should say
> this, but deleting it seems to be petty in terms of stopping its use
> when sitecustomize.py is too early and too system-wide and spraying
> .decode('utf-8')'s all over a code base made up of a load of eggs
> managed by buildout simply isn't feasible...
> 
> Thoughts?

Let's look at this from another angle: sys.setdefaultencoding()
is only made available for use in site.py. This is documented
and by design (since a site may want to set the default encoding
based on the locale or to "utf-8").

If you use it anywhere else, you're on your own. Such usage
is not supported and may very well break your interpreter or
cause data corruption (the default encoded versions of Unicode
objects are cached inside the objects).

Now, in your particular case, you're probably better off just
tweaking site.py directly in your custom Python interpreter
rather than relying on sitecustomize.py (see setencoding() in
site.py).

To answer your question: yes, this particular API may not be
used outside site.py.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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