[GRASS-dev] [release planning] GRASS GIS 7.8.6

[Helmut Kudrnovsky]

>Open questions for anyone with Windows (Helli? Others?):
>- Is g.extension failing for all add-ons or only for a few? A new
>blocker or not?

winGRASS g.extension is failing for some of the addons where some encoding issues pops up.

but see https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/pull/1496#issuecomment-812447963

>manually set PYTHONUTF8 in C:\OSGeo4W64\apps\grass\grass79\etc\env.bat
>
>[...]
>set PYTHONUTF8=1
>set GRASS_PYTHON=%OSGEO4W_ROOT%\bin\python3.exe
>[...]
>
>then
>
>	g.extension extension=i.fusion.hpf
>	Downloading precompiled GRASS Addons <i.fusion.hpf>...
>	Fetching <i.fusion.hpf> from <http://wingrass.fsv.cvut.cz/grass79/x86_64/addons/grass-7.9.dev/i.fusion.hpf.zip> (be patient)...
>	Updating extensions metadata file...
>	Updating extension modules metadata file...
>	WARNING: No metadata available for module 'constants'.
>	WARNING: No metadata available for module 'high_pass_filter'.
>	ERROR: Unable to read manual page: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\youruser\\AppData\\Roaming\\GRASS7\\addons\\docs\\html\\constants.html'
>
>at least no fileinput.FileInput error anymore

g.extension works then with these encoding issue addons

this is based upon https://docs.python.org/3/using/windows.html#utf-8-mode

> Windows still uses legacy encodings for the system encoding (the ANSI Code Page). Python uses it for the default encoding of text files (e.g. locale.getpreferredencoding()).
>
> This may cause issues because UTF-8 is widely used on the internet and most Unix systems, including WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).
>
> You can use UTF-8 mode to change the default text encoding to UTF-8.

I've tested a bit locally, g.extension works then (beside https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/issues/1499 , though that's a minor issue as all nested addons and helper libs are working, just a nasty warning ); (localized) GUI is mostly working.

though I have no idea if there are any possible side effects with set PYTHONUTF8=1 ....

maybe Anna, Maris have some ideas?

should we activate it in master and see what CI test are reporting?

kind regards
Helmut