[Python-Dev] PEP 538 warning at startup: please remove it (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Jun 12 08:24:56 EDT 2017

On 12 June 2017 at 18:56, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Nick Coghlan pushed his implementation of his PEP 538: nice! Nice step forward to UTF-8 everywhere ;-) I would prefer to not be annoyed by warning messages about encodings at startup if possible: "Python detected LCCTYPE=C: LCCTYPE coerced to C.UTF-8 (set another locale or PYTHONCOERCECLOCALE=0 to disable this locale coercion behavior)."

Note that there's an open issue for this linked from the What's New entry:

I suspect the eventual outcome is going to be dropping that particular warning (since it's been problematic for Fedora's 3.6 backport as well, and the problems are due to the warning itself, not the locale coercion), but I'd prefer to keep the notification at least for a while (potentially even until alpha 1).

OTOH, I'm also open to being persuaded otherwise if enough folks are running into problems with it just while working on CPython (I'd still like to turn it back on for alpha 1 even if we turn off in the meantime, though).

Cheers, Nick.

P.S. Part of my rationale for doing it this way is that I'm certain that after 3.7's release next year we're going to get at least a few users genuinely upset at our decision to move the ASCII-based C locale explicitly into the "legacy partially-supported environment" category, and even more upset that we're "silently ignoring their explicit configuration settings" by implicitly coercing it to something else.

Those kinds of concerns are much easier to address effectively if we can say "We tried it with an explicit warning, and it was too annoying to be usable; see if you want more details" than if we're in the situation of having to say "We assumed an explicit warning would be too annoying, so we never even tried it".

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

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