----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Kenigsberg" danken@redhat.com To: "Martin Sivak" msivak@redhat.com, dcaro@redhat.com Cc: vdsm-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2013 3:08:29 PM Subject: Re: environment encoding, LC_ALL and vdsm tests
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 05:50:16AM -0400, Martin Sivak wrote:
Hi,
recently I discovered an issue with our Jenkins test environment. It was failing in testHooks.py because my Gerrit name contains diacritics and our code tried to decode it as ascii.
Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/unittest.py", line 278, in run testMethod() File "/ephemeral0/vdsm_unit_tests_gerrit_el/tests/hooksTests.py", line 125, in test_deviceCustomProperties params={'customProperty': ' rocks!'}) File "/ephemeral0/vdsm_unit_tests_gerrit_el/vdsm/hooks.py", line 70, in _runHooksDir scriptenv[k] = unicode(v).encode('utf-8') UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 12: ordinal not in range(128)
The relevant code is here:
hooks.py:
60 scriptenv = os.environ.copy() ... 69 for k, v in scriptenv.iteritems(): 70 scriptenv[k] = unicode(v).encode('utf-8')
My first instinct was to decode it using the proper encoding:
source_encoding = sys.stdin.encoding or locale.getpreferredencoding() for k, v in scriptenv.iteritems(): scriptenv[k] = v.decode(source_encoding).encode('utf-8')
But it still did not work. So I tried to print out the environment and encodings that are used when make check is being run and got this:
sys.stdin.encoding == None locale.getpreferredencoding() -> ANSI_X3.4-1968 os.environ['LC_ALL'] == 'C' os.environ['LANG'] == 'en_US.UTF-8'
Please notice the encoding part, my system and terminal are using utf-8, but vdsm reads the environment values using ANSI. That is obviously wrong and can't work.
So i tried to investigate it further and found out we force LC_ALL to C in vdsmd.init, run_tests.sh.in and run_tests_local.sh.in.
I also found the commit that introduced this - 107644dbad9af250c00e7f25fc51a92c6250d442 - and finally understood where the issue was.
Although I understand the reasons for the patch, I do not agree with it. If we are executing other tools and parse their output, we should be preparing and passing the updated locale _only_ to those tools. We should not be setting the locale we need for parsing stuff to the whole vdsm daemon.
Since vdsm is not intended for direct human control, I actually like the idea of turning off all locale noise by a global LC_ALL=C. The alternative, of setting it to C before each application with parsed output seems tedious and easily forgotten.
Our current practice of setting LC_ALL to C no matter on what terminal or system we are starting vdsmd is causing us the above mentioned issue, because the environment can (and does) contain data in the system encoding. This essentially prevents anybody with utf-8 chars in their names to submit anything to vdsm.
No doubt that we have to fix it. The easiest hack is to ask our Jenkins job to clear the Jenkins env vars before calling `make check`. I'm sure David (CCed) can do it quite easily.
Yes, that should be easy, if you decide to do that, it can be done in 30min (smallest fraction of time for a task).
So I would like to start a discussion about this that will lead to the necessary fixes and change in our current practice :)
Unfortunately, I have no idea beyond exterminating non-7-bit chars from the environment and setting LC_ALL=C in n+1 places.
The first approach may not be so horrible as it seems: I'm not sure we should pass every vdsm env variable to the hook scripts. Passing only ascii ones may be good enough.
Obviously, unicode custom properties should continue to be explicitly added, with utf-8 encoding, to the script environment, as this is a documented vdsm API.
Dan.