[pacman-dev] [PATCH v2 5/8] Avoid problematic use of Python's StringIO.

[Jeremy Heiner]

On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 9:16 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 13/10/13 02:44, Jeremy Heiner wrote:
>> There was one hiccup in encoding in test sync600: the unicode strings
>> which work in other tests for some reason cause problems here. This
>> hiccup is only in 2.7, so a try block is used to fall back to use the
>> unencoded string on that runtime only.
>
> Using "for some reason" in the description is a clear flag for me not to
> apply the patch.  This tends to result in an underlying issue being
> missed due to lack of understanding.

Hi, Allan!
Yeah, I was not happy at all about having to put that exception
handler in. I tried a crazy number of other workarounds, and in doing
so I got quite a good understanding. But describing it adequately will
take a lot of typing. Like several pages. It is absolutely right of
you to ask, and I'm happy and able to provide that, but I doubt I can
get to it before tomorrow night. The short answer is that Unicode
support in Python 2 is fundamentally broken. Fixing that is why Python
3 got a major version bump and they had to give up on backwards
compatibility. Sorry I don't have more time right now to go into all
the gory details... and I hope the other readers won't be too bored by
my post when I do.
Thanks,
Jeremy