[Libosinfo] [PATCH] force a UTF-8 locale for python3 to avoid broken ascii codec

[Andrea Bolognani]

On Thu, 2019-09-05 at 18:19 +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 05, 2019 at 07:08:27PM +0200, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
> > It seems to happen because both debian & fedora (30+) containers do
> > not have the required locale.
> > I'd like to ask your suggestion on how to proceed here:
> > - Shall we explicitly include glibc-langpack-en as part of the base packages?
> >   - Its dependencies are: glibc, glibc-commonl
> >   - Its size is: 6.0 M (on Fedora 30);
> > - Shall we work around osinfo-db tests in a way that we can make it
> > work without setting the locale?
> 
> In theory C.UTF-8 is our desired locale, but that is a non-standard
> concept that is only carried as a downstream patch by certain distros.
> Upstream glibc has not accepted it. It doesn't exist at all on *BSD.
> Thus we picked en_US.UTF-8 as the only option that gives us UTF-8
> which is portable across all known operating systems.
> 
> If you can't set the locale, the only option is to mandate python
> 3.7 as the minimum python version, which I think is too strict.
> 
> IOW, we shoud just intall the langpack.

Sounds like a reasonable enough explanation to me.

> FWIW, I'm proposing the exact same en_US.UTF-8 env var for libvirt
> python code, so we'll need to deal with the same problem shortly
> there too.

When talking to Fabiano about this, I suggested we might want to add
the locale to the 'base' pseudo-project along with tools like git and
patch, and reading the above seems to confirm that's indeed the
direction we should go.

-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization