"import gtk" changes sys.getdefaultencoding()

[Andrew Bennetts]

>>> import sys
>>> print sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> import gtk
>>> print sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf-8'

This is bad. It is generally a bad idea for a library to change global state
that may break other libraries; it's worse that it does this as a side-effect of
merely being imported. sys.setdefaultencoding is also generally considered a
misfeature by the Python developers, and changing the default encoding from
'ascii' (except perhaps to 'undefined') is asking for potential bugs to be
hidden, rather than raising exceptions when you'd expect. There's a reason
sys.setdefaultencoding is not accessible by default.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132040: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132040

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. I've forwarded it upstream:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324323

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Already known as http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132040 upstream with
some comments on it

[Johan Dahlin (jdahlin-deactivatedaccount)]

It's not really possible to fix this, since the whole gtk+ stack requires all strings to be encoded in utf-8.
And also, it's part of the PyGTK API already, plenty of applications are going to break if it was removed.

[Kyle Brooks (kyle-brooks)]

Can't be fixed due to compatibility problems (see Johan Dahlin's recent comment): rejected

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I believe this issue is solved with modern pygtk using
    from gi.repository import Gtk
Which seems to avoid changing the default encoding.

[Guilherme Salgado (salgado)]

Indeed, if you import gi.repository.Gtk it won't, but it still does if you import pango.