40.7.1 break on unicode in setup.cfg

I have this package I need to install python-ldap==2.4.27 (yes, it’s old and it’s not my choice).

with setup tools 40.6.3 it installs fine by downloading, building the wheel and installing, like this:

Collecting python-ldap==2.4.27
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/fc/99/9eed836fe4d916792994838df125da9c25c5f7c31abfbf6f0ab076e5f419/python-ldap-2.4.27.tar.gz
Requirement already satisfied: setuptools in ./redacted/debian/redacted-xx-redacted/opt/redacted/redacted/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from python-ldap==2.4.27) (40.6.3)
Building wheels for collected packages: python-ldap
  Building wheel for python-ldap (setup.py) ... done
  Stored in directory: /root/.cache/pip/wheels/a9/e3/92/0baf18ac04e93c3e46aa581932576e4580f9167323502a0c4f
Successfully built python-ldap
Installing collected packages: python-ldap
Successfully installed python-ldap-2.4.27

with setup tools 40.7.1 it builds it differently and fails because there is an umlaut in a contributor’s name in the setup.cfg. Here’s the output.

Collecting python-ldap==2.4.27
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/fc/99/9eed836fe4d916792994838df125da9c25c5f7c31abfbf6f0ab076e5f419/python-ldap-2.4.27.tar.gz (125kB)
    100% |################################| 133kB 557kB/s
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    defines: HAVE_SASL HAVE_TLS HAVE_LIBLDAP_R
    extra_compile_args:
    extra_objects:
    include_dirs: /usr/include /usr/include/sasl /usr/local/include /usr/local/include/sasl
    library_dirs: /usr/lib /usr/lib64 /usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib64
    libs: ldap_r
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-install-Xy8be0/python-ldap/setup.py", line 182, in <module>
        **kwargs
      File "/build/redacted/debian/redacted-xx-redacted/opt/redacted/redacted/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/setuptools/__init__.py", line 144, in setup
        _install_setup_requires(attrs)
      File "/build/redacted/debian/redacted-xx-redacted/opt/redacted/redacted/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/setuptools/__init__.py", line 137, in _install_setup_requires
        dist.parse_config_files(ignore_option_errors=True)
      File "/build/redacted/debian/redacted-xx-redacted/opt/redacted/redacted/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/setuptools/dist.py", line 702, in parse_config_files
        self._parse_config_files(filenames=filenames)
      File "/build/redacted/debian/redacted-xx-redacted/opt/redacted/redacted/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/setuptools/dist.py", line 599, in _parse_config_files
        (parser.read_file if six.PY3 else parser.readfp)(reader)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 324, in readfp
        self._read(fp, filename)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 479, in _read
        line = fp.readline()
      File "/build/redacted/debian/redacted-xx-redacted/opt/redacted/redacted/venv/lib/python2.7/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
        return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 414: ordinal not in range(128)

It’s been hard to work around this because dh_virtualenv is not particularly amazing at allowing you to control the setup tools version (at leas the version I have and naturally this isn’t your problem) so I’m stuck getting the latest setuptools

[jayvdb]

If the locale is POSIX or C, wouldn’t it make sense to upgrade automatically to reading the setup.cfg file in UTF-8 instead of the user preference, as this file is intended to be distributed globally, not created by the user.

I was under the impression that setuptools forced PKG-INFO to be UTF-8, and now-a-days setup.cfg often provides the values which go into PKG-INFO.

[wb-towa]

Thanks, yes I did not initially think to check the locale settings of the system (that they would not be set) so I’ll consider this a user error.