[Reportbug-maint] Bug#539736: Bug#539736: reportbug: --subject does not accept non-ASCII characters

[Jakub Wilk]

* Sandro Tosi <morph at debian.org>, 2009-08-11, 18:10:
>what about setting
>
>import sys
>sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
>
>at the beginning of bin/reportbug ?

That would be totally wrong (even though the gtk module actually seems 
to be doing something like this). Let me quote GvR[1]:

| The fundamental reason the designers of Python's 2.x standard library 
| don't want you to be able to set the default encoding in your app, is 
| that the standard library is written with the assumption that the 
| default encoding is fixed, and no guarantees about the correct 
| workings of the standard library can be made when you change it. There 
| are no tests for this situation. Nobody knows what will fail when. And 
| you (or worse, your users) *will* come back to us with complaints if 
| the standard library suddenly starts doing things you didn't expect.

[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-August/091418.html

-- 
Jakub Wilk