On Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 11:24:54AM +0000, Thomas Spura wrote:
> Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek@in.waw.pl> schrieb am Sa., 10. Dez.
> 2016 um 23:50 Uhr:
>
> > On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 05:41:45PM -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > > On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 3:40 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
> > > <zbyszek@in.waw.pl> wrote:
> > > > On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 11:56:44PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> > > >> Along similar lines, what do folks think of the idea of patching
> > > >> Python 3.6 in Fedora to assume UTF-8 if it's told that it should use
> > > >> ASCII to communicate with the OS?
> > > > +1
> > > >
> > > > Non-utf8 environments are nowadays a rarity, OTOH misconfigured
> > > > installations which do support utf8 but are just missing an env var
> > > > are rather common (e.g. mock).
> > >
> > > Why aren't we fixing Fedora Cloud/Atomic and the container images to
> > > be C.UTF-8 instead of just plain C, then?
> >
> > It's a game of whack-a-mole. You can always fix that place you just
> > noticed where it's missing, but then a few days later it's in another
> > place. Not saying that we should be initializing the locale properly,
> > but rather than we can do both independently.
> >
> >
> To change the default encoding for python was proposed a while ago [1], but
> was finally dropped again, as upstream didn't agree to this change. Did
> anything changed here from upstream python?
>
> Best,
>    Thomas
>
> [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PythonEncodingUsesSystemLocale

That was 2010, now it's 2016, going on 2017. That was Python 2, now
it's Python 3.6 ;) But seriously, with Python 2 such changes were much
more risky: Unicode was bolted on, and it was (is) very easy to cause
things to fail unpredictably when Unicode was added to the mix. But
with Python 3, Unicode is the basis upon which everything is built,
and things more often start to fail when (unexpectedly) input is
suddenly not Unicode. I think the considerations are a bit different
for Python upstream, which has a lot of Windows users and utf-16, and
for Linux, where utf-8 is pervasive.

To make things less hand-wavy: there are concrete examples where this
would be known to help: containers as mentioned in the original
proposal, and mock (in my experience tests most often require setting
an utf-8 environment to work). Do we know of examples where the
proposed change would make things worse?