[ovs-dev] filename encoding in Python--any Python programmers in the house?

[Ben Pfaff]

The Debian builds of Open vSwitch have suffered mysterious (to me)
errors for some time, e.g.:
        https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=openvswitch&arch=amd64&ver=1.9.3%2Bgit20131021-1&stamp=1382373784&file=log

The root of these problems seems to be in filename encoding.  The Debian
buildds appear to build in directories named with gratuitous UTF-8, such
as:
        /«BUILDDIR»/openvswitch-1.9.3+git20131021/python/ovs/util.py

When I try "make check" in a directory with a similar name on my own
system, I get pretty clear encoding-related failures in the same tests,
e.g.:

    ../../tests/unixctl-py.at:10: $PYTHON $srcdir/appctl.py --timeout 20 -t ovs-vswitchd exit
    --- /dev/null   2013-07-07 19:52:44.697519595 -0700
    +++ /home/blp/nicira/«ovs»/_build/tests/testsuite.dir/at-groups/370/stderr      2013-10-21 09:59:11.000000000 -0700
    @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
    +Traceback (most recent call last):
    +  File "../../../../tests/appctl.py", line 75, in <module>
    +    main()
    +  File "../../../../tests/appctl.py", line 60, in main
    +    err_no, error, result = client.transact(args.command, args.argv)
    +  File "/home/blp/nicira/«ovs»/python/ovs/unixctl/client.py", line 41, in transact
    +    error, reply = self._conn.transact_block(request)
    +  File "/home/blp/nicira/«ovs»/python/ovs/jsonrpc.py", line 306, in transact_block
    +    error = self.send(request)
    +  File "/home/blp/nicira/«ovs»/python/ovs/jsonrpc.py", line 235, in send
    +    self.__log_msg("send", msg)
    +  File "/home/blp/nicira/«ovs»/python/ovs/jsonrpc.py", line 229, in __log_msg
    +    vlog.dbg("%s: %s %s" % (self.name, title, msg))
    +UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 22: ordinal not in range(128)

However I can't figure out the root cause of these problems.  In simple
tests with Python I don't get similar errors (note that the tests set
LC_ALL=C):

    blp at blp:~/nicira/«ovs»/_build(0)$ LC_ALL=C python
    Python 2.7.3 (default, Jan  2 2013, 16:53:07) 
    [GCC 4.7.2] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> import os
    >>> 'prefix %s postfix' % os.getcwd()
    'prefix /home/blp/nicira/\xc2\xabovs\xc2\xbb/_build postfix'
    >>> print 'prefix %s postfix' % os.getcwd()
    prefix /home/blp/nicira/«ovs»/_build postfix
    >>> 

So I'm pretty puzzled.  Can anyone help me out?

Thanks,

Ben.