Distutils fails logging characters which are not part of the "default encoding":

http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/builders/AMD64%20Ubuntu%20wide%203.x/builds/1062/steps/compile/logs/stdio

[...]
  File "/home/buildbot/cpython-ucs4-nonascii-\u20ac/3.x.pitrou-ubuntu-wide/build/Lib/distutils/dir_util.py", line 67, in mkpath
    log.info("creating %s", head)
  File "/home/buildbot/cpython-ucs4-nonascii-\u20ac/3.x.pitrou-ubuntu-wide/build/Lib/distutils/log.py", line 40, in info
    self._log(INFO, msg, args)
  File "/home/buildbot/cpython-ucs4-nonascii-\u20ac/3.x.pitrou-ubuntu-wide/build/Lib/distutils/log.py", line 30, in _log
    stream.write('%s\n' % msg)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u20ac' in position 81: ordinal not in range(128)
[54439 refs]

What is your locale and your locale encoding? distutils use ASCII but I'm not 
sure that your locale encoding is ASCII, because Python fails to start if the 
locale is ASCII and the path contains a non ASCII character.

See also issue #8611: "Python3 doesn't support locale different than utf8 and 
an non-ASCII path (POSIX)".

As I answered on IRC, this is on a buildbot environment. Compiling from the command line works fine, but not from the buildbot environment.

From the command line, the locale is as following:
$ locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

But I guess this information is not useful.

Ok, this might be more interesting:

$ cat | ./python -i
Python 3.2a0 (py3k:81010, May  8 2010, 23:25:47) 
[GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import locale
>>> locale.getpreferredencoding()
'UTF-8'
>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdin 
<_io.TextIOWrapper name='<stdin>' encoding='ascii'>
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf-8'

As you see, stdin uses ascii...

Anyway, regardless of the actual stdout encoding, distutils should be able to log messages without crashing, IMO.

Conditions to reproduce the bug: don't use make -j N (unset MAKEFLAGS), stdout and stderr should be be TTY => use make 2>&1|cat.

Another long-standing encoding bug was fixed: It was impossible to use e.g. an author name with non-ASCII characters. The fix makes distutils use UTF-8. Of course, it’s more complicated to choose an encoding for terminal I/O.

(I wrote before I saw Victor’s reply) Does it work with PYTHONIOENDODING set to UTF-8?

If the standard output is not a TTY, Python uses ASCII encoding for sys.stdout: ./python -c "import sys;print(sys.stdout.encoding)"|cat => ascii.

This issue remembers me: #8533 (regrtest: use backslashreplace error handler for stdout).

> If the standard output is not a TTY, Python uses ASCII encoding for 
> sys.stdout

We could perhaps fix this too, if python-dev agrees.

Attached patch escapes non-ASCII characters of the log message using ASCII+backslashreplace (but keep unicode type).

Wasn’t PYTHONIOENCODING added for such cases?

> Wasn’t PYTHONIOENCODING added for such cases?

Yes, it was, but it's a very bad workaround. In most if not all cases,
people will set PYTHONIOENCODING to their system's default encoding.
Therefore, they shouldn't have to set an environment variable at all.

> > If the standard output is not a TTY, Python uses ASCII encoding 
> > for sys.stdout

> We could perhaps fix this too, if python-dev agrees.

Open a new issue please if you consider that as a bug.

I tried to recompile Python with "export PYTHONIOENCODING=ascii" but it doesn't fail. That's because the Makefile calls "./python -E ./setup.py -q build": -E ignores environment variables.

New patch: use sys.stdout.encoding instead of ASCII. (If stdout is not a TTY, sys.stdout.encoding is ASCII.)

Conditions to reproduce the bug:
 - non ASCII directory
 - don't use make -j N (no MAKEFLAGS environment variable)
 - write make output into a pipe, eg. make 2>&1|cat

My 2 last patches are not enough: there are other functions writing non-ASCII strings to log whereas log encoding is ASCII. The right fix is to use the backslashreplace error handler for the log. Two solutions:
 a) replace sys.stdout by a new file using backslashreplace: I tried this solution for regrtest.py: #8533. My patch for regrtest.py doesn't work on Windows because of a newline issue
 b) emulate backslashreplace only in distutils log

I prefer (a) because it can be implemented in setup.py without touching distutils (tarek told me that distutils shouldn't be patched too much).

distutils_log_backslashreplace.patch implements (b).

I'll look at that asap. Although, all these patchs should have some tests demonstrating the bugs

setup_stdout_backslashreplace.patch implements point (a).

I don't know which solution is better. This issue is not specific to compiling CPython, other programs may fail in non-ASCII paths and so solution (b) is maybe better.

> Although, all these patchs should have some tests demonstrating the bugs

As discussed on IRC, fixing distutils.log package instead of setup.py is better. New patch includes unit tests.

I commited to patch on distutils.log in r81359 (py3k). I'm waiting for the buildbot before backporting to 3.1.

> I commited to patch on distutils.log in r81359 (py3k)

Backported to 3.1 as r81363.

I thought you had a unit test, I don't see any in your commit

> I thought you had a unit test, I don't see any in your commit

"patch -p0 < ... && svn ci" doesn't include new files. I forgot it.

r81361 includes the new file.