[Python-Dev] New PyPI broken package editing (original) (raw)

Walter Dörwald walter at livinglogic.de
Tue Mar 29 23:38:34 CEST 2005

Martin v. Löwis sagte:

Walter Dörwald wrote:

I'm not sure if this is the right approach. I think the approach is right, but the implementation is wrong.

The encoding I specify in setup.py should be independent of the encoding used between distutils and PyPI to communicate on the wire. I.e. the author (and maintainer) argument should always be unicode. "should" is a correct description. It should allow Unicode strings, which it then should encode to UTF-8 during transmission. The matter of fact is that the register command as released in 2.4 (and 2.4.1) doesn't.

OK, that's the problem.

When str is passed, this is treated as any other str in a unicode context, it is decoded using the default encoding. This would fix another problem: It would make it nearly impossible to send a request to PyPI with the wrong encoding, because any encoding problems are sorted out completely on the client side. distutils should not assume that byte strings are in the default encoding. It is fair to assume they are in ASCII;

They should be the same. If not, the installation is broken (or at least scripts that rely on this break anywhere else).

if the administrator has changed the default encoding, then this cannot possibly affect all the setup.py files out there. Also, it is a fact that the deployed versions of the register command just send byte strings in setup.py as-is, without trying to do any kind of recoding.

In any case, PyPI now requires that the form submission uses UTF-8, and refuses anything else. So it is impossible to send, say, Latin-1; whether the client makes that happen by properly encoding Unicode strings or whether they are in setup.py in the first place does not matter.

So can I have one setup.py for both Python 2.4 and Python 2.5 that does the correct thing when creating a Windows installer for Python 2.4 (I've used Unicode strings for that until now) and using the upload command with Python CVS (which seems to require a byte string now)? I'd like to avoid having to use version checks in setup.py.

[...]

Bye, Walter Dörwald

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