38.2.0 Breaks installs of several packages on 2.7 with UnicodeEncodeError parsing package METADATA

Using setuptools==38.2.0 on Python 2.7.14, this setup.py will fail on any of the packages under install_requires with errors such as UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 4258: ordinal not in range(128). None of these happened under 38.1.0 for instance. Error is happening on this line: https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/blob/97ff22f31ace57f4eabb6f1e77c9c553de0d1c24/setuptools/wheel.py#L59

from setuptools import setup, find_packages

setup(
    name="test-setuptools-encoding-problem",
    version="1.0.0",
    packages=find_packages(),
    install_requires=[
        "requests==2.18.4",
        "eventbrite==3.3.3",
        "django_mathfilters==0.4.0",
        "django-countries==5.0",
    ]
)

Verified it doesn’t happen with Python 3.6.3 for instance.

[benoit-pierre]

Branch is here if you want to test it: https://github.com/benoit-pierre/setuptools/tree/fix_wheels_metadata_handling

[mgrdcm]

Thank you so much for the quick work @benoit-pierre!