[Bug 1827857] Re: Stuck on applying package profile for servers running 18.04

[Simon Poirier]

I've been able to reproduce this bug consistently. It appears
python3-apt is at cause. If a non-utf8 locale is configured, apt will
returned descriptions in the preferred lang/encoding and python3 fails
to interpret them as utf8. Python2.7 did ascii conversion, returning
"lossy" unicode conversion but not crashing.

$ grep en_US /etc/locale.gen
en_US ISO-8859-1
# en_US.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15
# en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

$ LANG=en_US python3
Python 3.7.3 (default, Apr  3 2019, 05:39:12) 
[GCC 8.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import apt
>>> apt.Cache().get("gosa").versions[0].description
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apt/package.py", line 627, in description
    dsc = records.long_desc if records is not None else None
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xb2 in position 236: invalid start byte

** Also affects: python-apt (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to python-apt in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1827857

Title:
  Stuck on applying package profile for servers running 18.04

Status in landscape-client package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in python-apt package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  When I apply a package profile to a server, the activity is stuck on
  'in progress'. It only happens for servers running on 18.04 LTS. It
  works for servers running on 14.04 LTS.

  I can verify that this is not a connection issue by:
  * Manually installing the packages contained in the package profile
  * Installing the package profile directly using apt-get.

  The landscape server is hosted on-premise using version 18.01.
  The 18.04 server is running:
    * The latest version of landscape-client, 18.01-0ubuntu3.3.
    * Ubuntu Server 18.04.02 LTS using 4.15.x kernel.
    * Python version: 3.6.7

  Maybe relevant log files:

  package-changer.log 
  2019-05-06 11:59:55,977 WARNING  [MainThread] Package data not yet synchronized with server (...)

  package-reporter.log
  2019-05-06 12:00:07,581 ERROR    [MainThread] None
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xb2 in position 29: invalid start byte

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/landscape-client/+bug/1827857/+subscriptions