Installation of Py3.0rc1 fails on Mac OS X with bad locale

[Mario Ruggier]

Hi,

i had the following problem when installing py3.0rc1 on a Mac OS X  
10.5.5. On this system, the default locale values are:

$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=

but "UTF-8" is  is not a value for LC_CTYPE that is valid for python.  
Proceeding with the above settings, doing configurie/make of py3.0rc1  
fails:

$ cd Python-3.0rc1
$ ./configure
... # seems to goes ok
$ make
... # lots of omitted info output
ranlib: file: libpython3.0.a(pymath.o) has no symbols
gcc   -o python.exe \
			Modules/python.o \
			libpython3.0.a -ldl
make: *** [sharedmods] Error 1

So, after some poking, I change the value of LC_CTYPE as follows:

$ LC_CTYPE=
$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=

And then redoing the configure/make/install steps seems to all go OK:

$ make clean
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make test
$ sudo make altinstall

  $ python3.0 -c "import locale; print(locale.getdefaultlocale());"
(None, 'mac-roman')

Plus, running the newly installed python3.0 in the same terminal  
window seems to be just fine. However, when I start a new terminal  
(thus LC_CTYPE is back to its default value of "UTF-8") and run  
python3.0 again, there are no errors but there is never any output!  
For example:

$ python3.0 -c "import locale; print(locale.getdefaultlocale());"
$ python3.0
Python 3.0rc1 (r30rc1:66499, Oct 19 2008, 10:54:25)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> dir()
 >>>

If I however re-unset LC_CTYPE, as above, then stdout to console seems  
to work fine again. For completeness and curiosity, on the same system  
py2.6 and py2.5 give the following locale info:

$ python2.6 -c "import locale; print locale.getdefaultlocale();"
(None, 'mac-roman')
$ python -c "import locale; print locale.getdefaultlocale();"
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
   File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/ 
python2.5/locale.py", line 441, in getdefaultlocale
     return _parse_localename(localename)
   File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/ 
python2.5/locale.py", line 373, in _parse_localename
     raise ValueError, 'unknown locale: %s' % localename
ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8

I think this issue is related to the (currently open) "Python fails  
silently on bad locale" bug:
http://bugs.python.org/issue2173

How should this issue be worked around or dealt with? Should users on  
Mac OS X 10.5 change the default value of LC_CTYPE? To what?

mario