Setup fails if default encoding != utf8

[jajadinimueter]

This is due to non-ascii characters in docs/HISTORY.txt.

The problem is, that even when we specify the encoding in setup.py the setup still fails because distutils does not care about encodings when writing package meta info. So I really don't know how to fix this.

[fschulze]

From http://stackoverflow.com/a/11742928:

The only supported default encodings in Python are:

Python 2.x: ASCII
Python 3.x: UTF-8

If you change these, you are on your own and strange things will
start to happen.

[jajadinimueter]

My proposal is not to change the default encoding in python, but maybe change the HISTORY.TXT file so it does not contain non-ascii characters to make the setup independent of the operating systems default encoding.

[fschulze]

The problem is, that the default encoding is changed. Look at the output of this on the machine you have problems on:

import sys
print sys.getdefaultencoding()

[fschulze]

We live in 2013, unicode characters should work and people have a right to have their name written correctly.

[witsch]

+1!

[fschulze]

Oh and just to be clear. I want to fix this, but not by using ascii only. So any help to let me reproduce this issue is highly appreciated. So far I couldn't find a way to break this on the machines I have access to.

[jajadinimueter]

Yeah, I wouldn't be too happy with the "remove utf-8 characters from history.txt"...

Anyhow, I created a test script for you at https://github.com/jajadinimueter/mr.developer-encoding-error.git

I'm using ubuntu linux. This will create default freebsd locale settings and the install process will fail.

[joka]

This also happens with Debian systems.
You only have to use a minmal image without locale package or set your locale setting to none:

export LANG= 

For those systems we could just catch the error:

diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 1ff0239..ac1f5ec 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -29,12 +29,19 @@ extra = {}
 if sys.version_info >= (3,):
     extra['use_2to3'] = True

+long_description = ""
+try:
+    long_description = open("README.rst").read()\
+                       + "\n\n"\
+                       + open(os.path.join("docs", "HELP.txt")).read()\
+                       + open(os.path.join("docs", "HISTORY.txt")).read()
+except UnicodeDecodeError:
+    pass
+
 setup(name='mr.developer',
       version=version,
       description="A zc.buildout extension to ease the development of large projects with lots of packages.",
-      long_description=open("README.rst").read() + "\n\n" +
-                       open(os.path.join("docs", "HELP.txt")).read() +
-                       open(os.path.join("docs", "HISTORY.txt")).read(),
+      long_description=long_description,
       # Get more strings from http://www.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=list_classifiers
       classifiers=[
         "Programming Language :: Python",

[fschulze]

This should now be fixed on master. Thanks for script jajadinimueter!

[jajadinimueter]

Works for me! Even though my script did some things wrong it works never the less. Thank you very much!

[fschulze]

I fixed the script locally :) It was very helpful though, especially that it was easy to switch the python version.