Description of problem: When we use yum with rhnplugin enabled and LANG set to fr_FR and repositories can't be reach then after timeout yum display following message : Options Error: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xc1 in position 38: invalid start byte When we launch yum with LANG set to fr_FR.UTF8, or C, it is fine. Another workaround is to disable rhnplugin but it isn't possible then to install from rhn repo. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-rhn-plugin-2.0.1-1.el5 How reproducible: Launch yum with unreachable rhn repo and LANG set to another charset than UTF8 and another language with exotic character. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Make rhn repo unreachable 2. LANG=fr_FR yum remove <an_existing_package> 3. Actual results: Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security Options Error: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xc1 in position 38: invalid start byte Expected results: Error with exotic char displayed and no yum crash. Additional info:
I'm wondering why you'd want to have your operating system set to a latin1 encoding / locale. As far as french locale goes, you need to, from the support point of view anyway, use fr_FR.UTF-8. I'm sure there are many other places in our code which would show similar error with non-utf8 locales. As long as fr_FR.UTF-8 works, we have no case here, sorry. I'm closing this with wontfix.
This BZ closed some time during 2.5, 2.6 or 2.7. Adding to 2.7 tracking bug.