[Python-Dev] PEP 538: Coercing the legacy C locale to a UTF-8 based locale

[Chris Barker]

There was a bunch of discussion about all this a while back, in which I
think these points were addressed:

However, in some cases the C locale is a normal environment for system
> services, cron scripts, distro package builds and whatnot.
>

Indeed it is. But:

if you run a Python (or any) program that is expecting an ASCII-only
locale, then it will work jsut fine with any ascii-compatible locale. -- so
no problem there.

On the other hand, if you run a program that is expectign a unicode-aware
locale, then it might barf unexpectently if run on a ASCII-only locale. A
lot of people do in fiact have these issues (which are due to
mis-configuration of the host system, which is indeed not properly Python's
problem).

So if we do all this, then:

A) mis-configured systems will magically work (sometimes)

 This is a Good Thing.

and

B) If someone runs a python program that is expecting Unicode support on an
properly configured ASCII-only system, then it will mostly "just work" --
after all a lot of C APIs are simply char*, who cares what the encoding is?
It would not, however, fail if when a non-ascii value is used somewhere it
shouldn't.

So the question nis -- is anyone counting on errors in this case? i.e., is
a sysadmin thinking:

"I want an ASCII-only system, so I'll set the locale, and now I can expect
any program running on this system that is not ascii compatible to fail."

I honestly don't know if this is common -- but I would argue that trying to
run a unicode-aware program on an ASCII-only system could be considered a
mis-configuration as well.

Also -- many programs will just be writing bytes to the system without
checking encoding anyway. So this would simply let Python3 programs behave
like most others...

-CHB


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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