Python 2 compiled without wide unicode support

[JayH5]

Hi there 👋

Not sure if this is the right forum for this (maybe a GitHub Actions VM image issue), but the version of Python 2.7 when running in a VM is not compiled with wide unicode support (--enable-unicode=ucs4 during the configure step).

This seems the same on both ubuntu-18.04 and ubuntu-16.04 images.

Python installed from the Ubuntu repos does include wide unicode support, and so do the official Python Docker images.

This has the subtle effect that you can only install wheels built without wide unicode support (cp27m packages), rather than the more common wide unicode support (cp27mu). Some popular packages (e.g. pandas) only build wheels with wide unicode support and so will fail to install (for various reasons) on Python 2.7 in a GitHub Actions VM. Here is some code showing this.

[asottile]

Seeing the same on azure pipelines (which is presumably the same backend)

[konradpabjan]

Python 2.7 with wide character support should now be available to everyone

[lexelby]

Seems like this is broken again on the latest python available in a ubuntu-18.04 (2.7.17).

[konradpabjan]

Yup, looks like it's busted. Thanks for the heads up 😢 Confirmed: https://github.com/konradpabjan/TestPython/runs/414015432?check_suite_focus=true

@miketimofeev I know there has been some recent work in terms of how Python gets installed on our hosted runners. Could you take a look

[lexelby]

Thanks!

To unblock my project (inkstitch/inkstitch) I switched to installing python through apt but it'd be great if I could switch back to the already-installed one in the runner.