[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#724645: Error: Could not prefetch package provider 'apt': invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

[Helmut Grohne]

Package: puppet-common
Version: 3.3.0-1
Severity: normal

Since this release puppet started erroring out with this message:
| Debug: Prefetching apt resources for package
| Debug: Executing '["/usr/bin/dpkg-query", "-W", "--showformat", "'${Status} ${Package} ${Version} :DESC: ${Description}\\n:DESC:\\n'"]'
| Error: Could not prefetch package provider 'apt': invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

This is likely due to a change in the apt provider that fetches package
descriptions now whereas it did not earlier. It later queries other
packages individually and fails similarly if the respective package
description contains non-ascii characters. For instance the description
of python-jinja2 is rejected, but python-werkzeug is queried just fine.

This ultimately leads to puppet not applying configuration for packages
that contain non-ascii characters in their description.

The issue appears to be locale-specific, because it is not reproducible
when setting LC_ALL, LANG or LC_CTYPE to en_US.utf8. Puppet should not
use the user provided locale to decode package descriptions, because
dpkg-query always outputs utf8.

Helmut

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages puppet-common depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.113+nmu3
ii  facter                        1.7.2-1
ii  lsb-base                      4.1+Debian12
ii  ruby                          1:1.9.3
ii  ruby-augeas                   0.5.0-1
ii  ruby-hiera                    1.0.0~rc3-1
ii  ruby-safe-yaml                0.9.5-1
ii  ruby-shadow                   2.1.4-2
ii  ruby1.8 [ruby-interpreter]    1.8.7.358-8
ii  ruby1.9.1 [ruby-interpreter]  1.9.3.448-1
ii  sysv-rc                       2.88dsf-41

Versions of packages puppet-common recommends:
ii  debconf-utils  1.5.51
ii  lsb-release    4.1+Debian12

Versions of packages puppet-common suggests:
pn  librrd-ruby   <none>
pn  ruby-selinux  <none>