launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Maris Fogels <maris.fogels@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/19/2010 10:36 AM, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Maris Fogels<maris.fogels@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>  writes:
> > Danilo, I have a fix for this here:
> >   lp:~mars/launchpad/fix-ec2-email-encoding
>
> Maris, this makes me wonder: do we have a policy on where encoding of
> strings happens?  Some projects state that all strings beyond a certain
> boundary in the API will be in UTF-8 (or whatever).  Your fix is great,
> but this seems like the sort of bug that will bite us again.
>
> I don't see anything in the dev wiki about it, and don't recall any such
> guideline from conversations about Launchpad coding.  Is there one, or
> if not, should there be?
>
> -Karl

I do not know of any policy.  I just used the Python rule of thumb: encoding and 
decoding happens at the boundaries; Use unicode objects in between.  I agree 
that this could be a problem in the future though.

I think the code structure is the issue here.  There are .encode() lines 
scattered throughout the module.  My preferred solution in this case would be to 
extract a SubmitOptions object to hold the mail-related options.  I would add a 
write_option_to_file() method to the object that would be the single point for 
binary encoding to take place.


Maris