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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 15 March 2017 at 00:17, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 13 March 2017 at 23:31, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 13, 2017, at 04:37, INADA Naoki wrote:
>> > But locale coercing works nice on platforms like android.
>> > So how about simplified version of PEP 538?  Just adding configure
>> > option for locale coercing
>> > which is disabled by default.  No envvar options and no warnings.
>>
>> A configure option just kicks the decision to packagers - either no-one
>> uses it (and thus it solves nothing) or people do use it (and any
>> problems it causes won't be mitigated at all)
>>
>
> Distro packagers have narrower user bases and a better known set of
> compatibility constraints than upstream, so kicking platform integration
> related config decisions downstream to us(/them) is actually a pretty
> reasonable thing for upstream to do :)
>
> For example, while I've been iterating on the reference implementation for
> 3.7, Charalampos Stratakis has been iterating on the backport patch for
> Fedora 26, and he's found that we really need the PEP's "disable the C
> locale warning" config option to turn off the CLI's coercion warning in
> addition to the warning in the shared library, as leaving it visible breaks
> build processes for other packages that check that there aren't any
> messages being emitted to stderr (or otherwise care about the exact output
> from build tools that rely on the system Python 3 runtime).
>

The build processes that broke due to the warning were judged to be a bug
in autoconf rather than a problem with the warning itself:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=autoconf-archive.git;a=commit;h=883a2abd5af5c96be894d5ef7ee6e9a2b8e64307

So we're going to leave this as it is in the PEP for now (i.e. the locale
coercion warning always happens unless you preconfigure a locale other than
C), but keep an eye on it to see if it causes any other problems.

Cheers,
Nick.

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