UnicodeDecodeError decode error during linking

I just got this error during linking the devel products (this is on pre-0.4.0-clean-pkgs):

Errors     << zeno_tracking_lib:symlink /home/den2pal/work/ros_ws/logs/zeno_tracking_lib/build.symlink.003.log                                                                                                                             
Stage `symlink` failed with arguments:
  package: {'package_format': 2, 'exports': [], 'buildtool_export_depends': [], 'exec_depends': [<catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a4522bb90>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a4522bcb0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a4522bc50>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a4522be90>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb050>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb0b0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb110>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb170>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb1d0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb230>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb290>], 'name': 'zeno_tracking_lib', 'filename': '/home/den2pal/work/ros_ws/src/pilot/TrackingLib/package.xml', 'replaces': [], 'version_abi': None, 'build_export_depends': [<catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb2f0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb350>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb3b0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb410>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb470>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb4d0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb530>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb590>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb5f0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb650>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb6b0>], 'doc_depends': [], 'test_depends': [], 'maintainers': [<catkin_pkg.package.Person object at 0x7f7a45220150>], 'version': '0.0.0', 'build_depends': [<catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb710>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb770>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb7d0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb830>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb890>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb8f0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb950>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eb9b0>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eba10>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451eba70>, <catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451ebad0>], 'urls': [], 'authors': [<catkin_pkg.package.Person object at 0x7f7a45220490>], 'licenses': ['ZenoWay internal'], 'buildtool_depends': [<catkin_pkg.package.Dependency object at 0x7f7a451ebb30>], 'conflicts': [], 'description': u'Zeno Pilot TrackingLib'}
  metadata_path: /home/den2pal/work/ros_ws/.catkin_tools/profiles/default
  devel_manifest_path: /home/den2pal/work/ros_ws/.catkin_tools/profiles/default/packages/zeno_tracking_lib
  prebuild: False
  package_path: pilot/TrackingLib
  dest_devel_path: /home/den2pal/work/ros_ws/devel
  source_devel_path: /home/den2pal/work/ros_ws/devel/.private/zeno_tracking_lib
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/den2pal/work/py/catkin_tools/catkin_tools/execution/executor.py", line 148, in async_job
    event_queue))
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 in position 40: ordinal not in range(128)

It seems that I had a strange character in a library name. After deleting the .so file manually and retyping the library name in CMakeLists.txt the problem is gone and I cannot reproduce it.

[MatthiasNieuwenhuisen]

Hi,

we experienced the same problem. Two packages install a library with the same name and generating the md5 sum of the libraries fails because of the encoding error. We have tried with catkin_tools 0.4.2, the master branch and the better-tracebacks version. If we remove the encode(‘utf-8’) function from line 272-273 in catkin_tools/jobs/catkin.py the collisions are correctly identified and the build process finishes. The workspace was cleanly initialized with

source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash
catkin init
catkin build

We have tested it with Python 2.7.6.

> locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

A toy example to reproduce with the attached .so:

>>> import os
>>> from md5 import md5
>>> source_file = 'liblibelas.so'
>>> md5(open(os.path.realpath(source_file)).read()).hexdigest()
'fd72bce4e872072e940df0d08b5ded74'
>>> md5(open(os.path.realpath(source_file)).read().encode('utf-8')).hexdigest()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x90 in position 24: ordinal not in range(128)

liblibelas.zip

Best, Matthias

[jbohren]

@TDiazT Thanks for the additional report, it looks like you’re also having the unicode error, but you’re also getting numerous symlink errors. Are you re-using a develspace built with another tool?