Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Unicode error while running rdiff-backup

[Andrew Ferguson]

On Apr 22, 2008, at 5:01 PM, Saptarshi Guha wrote:

> Hello,
> 	I ran rdiff-backup --exclude ~/Library/Caches ~/Library address@hidden::/ 
> Library
>         during this process i got the following error(emphasis mine)
>         I'm not sure the error is related tot the Citrix ICA client file.
>         How do i fix this **without** needing to exclude specific files.

Hi Saptarshi,

To the best of my knowledge, rdiff-backup has not been well tested  
with Unicode filenames, particularly between operating systems.

Unicode support in Python has evolved over the years, and thus it  
would be difficult to add it to rdiff-backup while still maintaining  
our compatibility with Python 2.2. Unicode strings are currently a  
separate type and would require making sure that all of rdiff-backup's  
code, and the libraries on which it relies, can handle either type.

The forthcoming Python 3.0 (to be released later this year, I  
understand) will break backwards compatibility with Python 2.x and  
will, at that time, represent all strings as Unicode. rdiff-backup  
will move to Python 3 at some time, and will then have the Unicode  
filename support that you seek.


All that said, patches to support unicode in rdiff-backup on Python  
2.2 - 2.5 are, of course, welcome.


best,
Andrew