Reading the README.rst file throws encoding errors on some systems.

[weaverba137]

I'm trying to test installs of desimodel on the new DESI+Anaconda infrastructure.

I'm using the desi-conda/3.5-20160913 module on both edison and datatran. I'm also using the current desi-conda branch of desiutil. On datatran, everything installs fine, but on edison, when the setup.py file tries to read the README.rst file, it complains:

Error during installation: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 38, in <module>
    setup_keywords['long_description'] = readme.read()
  File "/global/common/edison/contrib/desi/conda/conda_3.5-20160913/lib/python3.5/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
    return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xce in position 3401: ordinal not in range(128)

In fact, if you look closely at the README.rst file for desimodel, it is not ASCII, it contains µ characters.

So which is more mysterious: that the install succeeded on datatran or that it failed on edison?

[weaverba137]

Hmmm, here's a possible clue. On datatran, the environment variable LANG=en_US.UTF-8. On edison I don't have LANG set at all.

[weaverba137]

And, I think I just answered my own question.

[sbailey]

I also just removed the μ symbol from the README. Although UTF-8 should be supported everywhere, in practice it isn't and there isn't really any benefit to have "μm" instead of "microns" in the README file.

Related: while preparing an optical distortion data file, we received a text file that was inherited from Mike Sholl, generated on Windows. I could see it fine with μm units in gmail/safari and textmate; @dkirkby saw it as a Chinese character (in gmail); another engineer (on Windows) saw it as a 5m, and when I loaded it into Word it was some box-drawing double bar symbol. In the end we're writing an ASCII only file with "microns"...

[moustakas]

um is another acceptable possibility for "microns".