The createrepo operation fails with UnicodeDecodeError exception

PeterSteele · 09-29-2012, 08:03 PM

I'm building a custom iso following the process described here, but when I run the command

createrepo -u “media://$discinfo” -g repodata/*comps.xml .

I get the following exception:

Code:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/createrepo/genpkgmetadata.py", line 249, in <module>
    main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/share/createrepo/genpkgmetadata.py", line 223, in main
    mdgen.doPkgMetadata()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/createrepo/__init__.py", line 367, in doPkgMetadata
    self.writeMetadataDocs(packages)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/createrepo/__init__.py", line 531, in writeMetadataDocs
    self.primaryfile.write(po.xml_dump_primary_metadata())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 1206, in xml_dump_primary_metadata
    msg += misc.to_unicode(self._dump_base_items())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 1045, in _dump_base_items
    msg += self._return_remote_location()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

Does anyone know what this error is caused by? My character set is UTF-8, and the operation is apparently trying to process a character code > 127 as an ASCII character. Before I go digging into Python code, can anyone explain what is happening here? I didn't actually make any changes to the iso. I just copied everything as is, without actually adding any of my own rpms at this point, and tried to recreate the iso with the original data.

nugat · 10-01-2012, 01:04 AM

Do you get the same error if you leave off the -g comps.xml bit? At least you would know if that was part of the problem...

PeterSteele · 10-01-2012, 08:08 AM

Well, the comps.xml is the primary input for the operation and my guess is that it is something in that file that the command is complaining about. That said, I tried taking off the -u option and the problem went away, and more importantly the custom iso I am creating appears to work okay.

The man page describes the -u option as:

Code:

       -u --baseurl <url>
              Optional base url location for all files. (not used by any clients at this time)

If there are no clients that make use of this option, it seemed reasonable to remove it.

nugat · 10-01-2012, 10:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PeterSteele

Well, the comps.xml is the primary input for the operation and my guess is that it is something in that file that the command is complaining about. That said, I tried taking off the -u option and the problem went away, and more importantly the custom iso I am creating appears to work okay.

did you run the previous command in those steps, the one that creates the discinfo variable based upon the contents of the .discinfo file? anyway, i am able to replicate your error if I omit that step.

if I run it this way, it seems to work:

Code:

declare -x discinfo=`head -1 .discinfo`
echo $discinfo
createrepo -u "media://$discinfo" -g repodata/*comps.xml .

you just might have to supply the path to the .discinfo file in the first command. That file is in the root of the DVD/ISO image.

PeterSteele · 10-02-2012, 12:00 AM

Yes, I am following all of the steps. Not sure why it's giving me a hard time, but it's working fine with the -u option removed, so I guess I'll leave it at that. I suspect it's "user error" somewhere on my part...

darrowco · 05-07-2013, 04:58 PM

Hope this saves someone some time, I had the same thing:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

Turned out that the offending char was the double quotes in my cut'n'paste - oops.

createrepo -u “media://$discinfo” -g repodata/*comps.xml .

vs

createrepo -u "media://$discinfo" -g repodata/*comps.xml .

PeterSteele · 05-07-2013, 06:47 PM

This was not the cause in my case. I never did find the root cause, but my solution worked...