apt unicode error

[alexbruy]

Just installed apt via OSGeo4W installer under Windows XP. When I try to run it from OSGeo4W Shell I get error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 991, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 36-42: ordinal not in range(128)

My system is Windows XP Pro SP3, all packages downloaded with OSGeo4W installer and stored in D:\install\gis\osgeo4w\offline\. Working installation is C:\OSGeo4W

[jef]

Does your account name have non-ascii characters in it?

[alexbruy]

No, only ASCII.

[maphew]

Apt doesn't know anything about unicode yet.

What is your Start Menu path?

Line 991 of apt.py attempts to create the environment variable OSGEO4W_STARTMENU, which in turn is derived from the system ALLUSERSPROGRAMS special folder -- this is C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu on a us-english win7 computer and C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs on us-english winXP.

[alexbruy]

Seems this is root of the problem. In non-english (in my case Russian/Ukrainian?) Windows XP Start Menu path contains non-ASCII characters C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Главное меню\Программы

[maphew]

I did some research on how to handle unicode in python and everything I found is way over my head. I'm afraid apt will have to classified as working on ansi systems only for the time being. (patches to change this gratefully accepted).

A workaround would be to edit bin\apt-dev.py and change:

## insert at line 2:
# coding: utf-8

## line 991 from:
OSGEO4W_STARTMENU = get_special_folder(ALLUSERSPROGRAMS) + "\\" + start_menu_name
# to:
OSGEO4W_STARTMENU = r'C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Главное меню\Программы'
# or to skip menu links altogether:
OSGEO4W_STARTMENU = os.getenv('TEMP')

(and then run apt-dev instead of apt of course.)

[jef]

the attached patch fixes the problem for me