On 04:08 pm, ch...@simplistix.co.uk wrote:
Hi All,
Would anyone object if I removed the deletion of of
sys.setdefaultencoding in site.py?
I'm guessing "yes!" so thought I'd state my reasons now:
This deletion appears to be pretty flimsy; reload(sys) and you have it
back. Which is lucky, because I need it after it's been deleted...
The ability to change the default encoding is a misfeature. There's
essentially no way to write correct Python code in the presence of this
feature.
Using setdefaultencoding is never the sensible way to deal with encoded
strings. Actually exposing this function in the sys module would lead
all kinds of people who haven't fully grasped the way str, unicode, and
encodings work to doing horrible things to create broken programs. It's
bad enough that it's already possible to get this function back with the
reload(sys) trick.
Why? Well, because you can no longer put sitecustomize.py in a project-
specific location (http://bugs.python.org/issue1734860) and because for
some projects the only way I can deal with encoded strings sensibly is
to use setdefaultencoding, in my case at the start of a script
generated by zc.buildout's zc.recipe.egg (I *know* all the encodings in
this project are utf-8, but I don't want to go playing whack-a-mole
with whatever modules this rather large project uses that haven't been
made properly unicode aware).
Yes, it needs to be used as early as possible, and the docs should say
this, but deleting it seems to be petty in terms of stopping its use
when sitecustomize.py is too early and too system-wide and spraying
.decode('utf-8')'s all over a code base made up of a load of eggs
managed by buildout simply isn't feasible...
Thoughts?
It may be a major task, but the best thing you can do is find each str
and unicode operation in the software you're working with and make them
correct with respect to your inputs and outputs. Flipping a giant
switch for the entire process is just going to change which things are
wrong.
Jean-Paul
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