Merge branch 'release-0.3.7'0.3.7

3 files changed, 66 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/docs/dev/encodings.rst b/docs/dev/encodings.rst
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..a3fc4b70
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/dev/encodings.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+.. _encodings:
+
+Strings encoding problems
+=========================
+
+This document is meant to avoid ``UnicodeError`` (``UnicodeEncodeError`` , ``UnicodeDecodeError``) and to set a base that allows the users to keep away headaches.
+
+
+First approach
+--------------
+
+One of the problems with python 2 that makes hard to find out problems is the implicit conversion between ``str`` and ``unicode``.
+
+Look at this code::
+
+    >>> u'ä'.encode('utf-8')
+    '\xc3\xa4'
+    >>>
+    >>> u'ä'.decode('utf-8')
+    Traceback (most recent call last):
+    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
+    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
+        return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
+    UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
+
+A situation like this could happen if the user confuse one type for another. 'encode' is a method of ``unicode`` and 'decode' is a method of ``str``, since you call 'decode', python "knows" how to convert from ``unicode`` to ``str`` and then call the 'decode' method, *that* conversion is made with the safe default "ascii" which raises an exception.
+
+
+We need to know which one we are using **every time**. A possible way to avoid mistakes is to use ``leap_assert_type`` at the beginning of each method that has a ``str``/``unicode`` parameter.
+The best approach we need to use ``unicode`` internally and when we read/write/transmit data, encode it to bytes (``str``).
+
+
+Examples of problems found
+--------------------------
+
+* **logging data**: ``logger.debug("some string {0}".format(some_data))`` may fail if we have an ``unicode`` parameter because of the conversion needed to output it.
+    We need to use ``repr(some_data)`` to avoid encoding problems when sending data to the stdout. An easy way to do it is: ``logger.debug("some string {0!r}".format(some_data))``
+
+- **paths encoding**: we should return always ``unicode`` values from helpers and encode them when we need to use it.
+    The stdlib handles correctly ``unicode`` strings path parameters.
+    If we want to do something else with the paths, we need to convert them manually using the system encoding.
+
+Regarding the encoding, use a hardcoded encoding may be wrong.
+Instead of encode/decode using for instance 'utf-8', we should use this ``sys.getfilesystemencoding()``
+
+For the data stored in a db (or something that is some way isolated from the system) we may want to choose 'utf-8' explicitly.
+
+Steps to improve code
+---------------------
+
+#. From now on, keep in mind the difference between ``str`` and ``unicode`` and write code consequently.
+#. For each method we can add a ``leap_assert_type(parameter_name, unicode)`` (or ``str``) to avoid type problems.
+#. Each time that is possible move towards the unicode 'frontier' (``unicode`` inside, ``str`` (bytes) outside).
+#. When is possible update the methods parameters in order to be certain of the data types that we are handling.
+
+Recommended info
+----------------
+
+* PyCon 2012 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHbC6udIqc
+    * article and transcription: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
+* PyConAr 2012 (Spanish): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQJ0emlYv50
+* Overcoming frustrations: http://pythonhosted.org/kitchen/unicode-frustrations.html
+* Python's Unicode howto: http://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html
+* An encoding primer: http://www.danielmiessler.com/study/encoding/
diff --git a/docs/dev/quickstart.rst b/docs/dev/quickstart.rst
index 8ef7dfb8..96dcaeb9 100644
--- a/docs/dev/quickstart.rst
+++ b/docs/dev/quickstart.rst
@@ -61,7 +61,7 @@ also install the needed dependencies::
 
 Compile the resource files::
 
-    (bitmask)$ make resources
+    (bitmask)$ make
 
 Copy necessary files into system folders, with root privileges::
 
diff --git a/docs/index.rst b/docs/index.rst
index f210be8c..acf97ff3 100644
--- a/docs/index.rst
+++ b/docs/index.rst
@@ -50,6 +50,7 @@ If you want to contribute to the project, we wrote this for you.
    dev/workflow
    dev/resources
    dev/internationalization
+   dev/encodings
 
 .. dev/internals
    dev/authors