[Libguestfs] [PATCH v3] python: Fix UnicodeError in inspect_list_applications2() (RHBZ#1684004)

[Sam Eiderman]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 2:39 PM Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Sam,
>
> I was doing some work on the Python bindings, starting with removing
> support for Python 2 since it's EOL.  I thought I would have a look at
> this patch.
>

This is great, I'm currently working on adding python3 type hints to
the auto-generated functions, due to libguestfs's nature this is
easily possible.
(However a bit tricky if we want to preserve the 79 chars per line and
correct tabbing)


> So firstly I think the last version posted is:
>
>   https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2020-April/msg00190.html
>
> My impression of this is that we shouldn't just hack the Python
> bindings to make this apparently work.  But I wanted to ask you a few
> questions about this:
>
>  - Does the SUSE RPM output contain a mix of encodings?  Or is
>    it all latin-1 or utf-8?
>

Not so sure about that, only the packages mentioned in the commit
message were the ones that failed that utf8 conversion function - Not
sure if all the other packages are latin1 encoded but succeed to be
utf-8 decoded.

>  - Is there any indication of the correct encoding from RPM?

As far as I know it must always be utf-8

>
>  - Can we not instead escape the bad sequences using whatever is the
>    C-level equivalent of str.encode(..., 'backslashreplace')?
>    Or I guess better, escape them as Unicode compatibility characters
>    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_compatibility_characters

The v2 of my patch which was reviewed by Daniel does exactly that, I used:

return PyUnicode_Decode(str, size, "utf-8", "replace");

However see Nir's comment

>
> Rich.
>
> --
> Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
> Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
> virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
> software inside the virtual machine.  Supports Linux and Windows.
> http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/
>

Thanks!