[Python-Dev] PEP 538 warning at startup: please remove it

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Mon Jun 12 16:58:40 EDT 2017


On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 1:48 PM Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Jun 12, 2017 10:50, "Gregory P. Smith" <greg at krypto.org> wrote:
>
>
> The problem, as with all warnings, is that it isn't the user who has
> control over the problem who sees the warning. It is the end use of an
> application on a system that sees it.
>
>
> I don't think I understand the distinction you're making here. This isn't
> like DeprecationWarnings where python is trying to tell the application
> developer that they need to fix something, and the application user gets
> caught in the crossfire. In this case there's nothing the application
> developer can do – the problem is that the end user has their system
> misconfigured, and probably should fix their .bashrc or crontab something
> before running the application. Or maybe they shouldn't and python should
> just do its thing and it's fine. But if anyone's going to do something it
> would have to be the end user, right?
>
> (I don't have an opinion on the warning itself; I'd be mildly interested
> to discover which of my systems are broken in this fashion but it doesn't
> affect me much either way. It does occur to me though that it will probably
> make some sysadmins *extremely* cranky: the ones that have crontabs with
> broken locales and which are set to email if their script generates any
> output – I think these are both still cron defaults – and who after
> upgrading to py37 will suddenly find copies of this warning pouring into
> their inboxes at a rate of hundreds per hour.)
>
> -n
>

I guess so. It is a system environment configuration problem. But I'd still
imagine that end users never touch their LANG or LC_* environment variables
themselves.  (the only time I touch anything is to explicitly set LANG=C on
occasion when I want text process shell tools to run a lot faster; but I
hardly count as I live in ascii-land, aka the US)

I'm inclined to suggest it should be silent, but I'm curious if we can get
some linux distros testing with it enabled during the beta period to see
how much impact it actually has on users in the real world. We could be
talking about a minor non-issue.

-gps
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