Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 701344
yum tracebacks when package with ® in name is installed
Last modified: 2014-01-21 01:23:27 EST
Description of problem: Unable to update a system from satellite with Adobe®_LiveCycle® products installed. Getting errors: While running 'registration.update_packages': caught exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError : 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xae' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): RHN 5.4 How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. Register system to satellite. 2. Install packages to system with ® in name.(example Adobe®_LiveCycle®) 3. Attempt to update system using 'yum update'. Actual results: Getting error: Error communicating with server. The message was: While running 'registration.update_packages': caught exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError : 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xae' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128) Expected results: All packages on system should be updated to packages on satellite. Additional info:
Created attachment 530099 [details] test rpm Rpm to reproduce the bug.
I think we need a _really_ good reason to not just close this as Not a Bug: 1. None of our tools have been tested with utf-8 package names. 2. It's not possible to create them with rpmbuild, and Fedora/RHEL wouldn't allow them if this was fixed (due to #1). 3. We already support utf-8 in summary/description, so the "feature" we get by supporting this seems very minimal . 4. The number of fixes required is likely _huge_. Just as an example, we rely on len(pkg.name) == width of string on screen and using things like %*.*s on it ... converting all of those to utf8_width() and utf8_chop() etc. is going to be a lot of work (and has layering problems). And that's _just_ yum+urlgrabber. ...it _might_ be worth fixing up "yum install blah.rpm" to nicely reject pkgs. with utf-8 in their name, but I'm not convinced of that either as it'll get zero testing in the future.
Since RHEL 6.2 External Beta has begun, and this bug remains unresolved, it has been rejected as it is not proposed as exception or blocker. Red Hat invites you to ask your support representative to propose this request, if appropriate and relevant, in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
GSS: per comment #14, let's file an RFE to extend the UTF-8 support outside of just the summary/description. I'm going to close this bug so that we can focus on higher priority items.