unicode error with mergerepos against CentOS 5.

[Seth Vidal]

On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Steve Traylen wrote:

> Hi,
>
> $ rpm -qf /usr/libexec/kojid/mergerepos
> koji-builder-1.3.1-1.fc10.noarch
>
> Running agaist Fedora repositories all looks well but against CentOS.
>
> /usr/libexec/kojid/mergerepos -a x86_64 \
>   -o repo  \
>   -r  http://swissmirror.silyus.net/centos/5.2/os/i386/
>
> Adding repo: http://swissmirror.silyus.net/centos/5.2/os/i386/
> 1/400 - Deployment_Guide-or-IN-5.2-9.el5.centos.noarch
> 2/400 - 1:kde-i18n-Icelandic-3.5.4-1.noarch
> ....
> ....
> 328/400 - system-config-users-1.2.51-4.el5.noarch
> 329/400 - yum-priorities-1.1.10-9.el5.centos.noarch
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "/usr/libexec/kojid/mergerepos", line 241, in <module>
>   main(sys.argv[1:])
> File "/usr/libexec/kojid/mergerepos", line 236, in main
>   merge.write_metadata()
> File "/usr/libexec/kojid/mergerepos", line 216, in write_metadata
>   mdgen.doPkgMetadata()
> File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/createrepo/__init__.py", line
> 332, in doPkgMetadata
>   self.writeMetadataDocs(packages)
> File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/createrepo/__init__.py", line
> 472, in writeMetadataDocs
>   self.primaryfile.write(po.xml_dump_primary_metadata())
> File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 943,
> in xml_dump_primary_metadata
>   msg += misc.to_unicode(self._dump_format_items())
> File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 809,
> in _dump_format_items
>   msg += self._dump_pco('provides')
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position
> 38: ordinal not in range(128)
>
> Tried with a few other repos as well, e.g the i386 one , the two
> merged , ... it fails the same
> though apparently  at different packages.
>

the metadata you're pulling in was written with a much older createrepo 
which was less picky about some of the data it wrote back out. So you end 
up with some pkgs with dodgy data in the changelogs.

-sv