UnicodeDecodeError when installing dbt

Describe the bug

When attempting to pip install dbt a UnicodeDecodeError is thrown. Our machine’s default encoding is ANSI_X3.4-1968

This error was traced back to a specific character in the README. It is the dash that follows the line: Models frequently build on top of one another. If this character is removed dbt can install correctly.

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u2013' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Steps To Reproduce

pip install dbt

Expected behavior

We expect to properly install dbt.

Screenshots and log output

    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-6skr9ygr-build/setup.py", line 9, in <module>
        long_description = f.read()
      File "/usr/lib/python3.6/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
        return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 1860: ordinal not in range(128)

System information

Which database are you using dbt with?

• postgres
• redshift
• bigquery
• snowflake
• other (specify: N/A)

The output of dbt --version:

N/A

The operating system you’re using: GNU/Linux The output of python --version: Python 3.6.8

Additional context

Add any other context about the problem here.

[markberger]

Hi @drewbanin, I’m also encountering this bug. A better fix might be to require setuptools v40.1.0+ because this version supports unicode chars:

https://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/history.html#v40-1-0

It looks like the core package already requires this version of setuptools, so the enforcement just needs to occur in the overall setup.py:

https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt/blob/dev/0.15.1/core/setup.py#L6

Would you be open to this change? If so I’m happy to open a PR. Thanks!

[drewbanin]

I just changed this to a #wontfix - while I’d still be happy to merge a PR which changes this one particular character (i don’t feel opinionated on a dash vs. an em-dash at all), there are surely going to be other such characters placed in and around the dbt codebase in the future. I’m not inclined to make a rule that we will never include such characters in the dbt codebase/readme, so going to close this on that principle.

@alejandro-flores-1 if you’re able to sign the CLA, please do feel free to re-open the PR against dev/louisa-may-alcott.