[BUG] Invalid string type when reading declarative `setup.cfg` under Python 2

[webknjaz]

Hi,

I'm seeing the following error:

error: 'egg_base' must be a directory name (got `src`)

The config contains:

[options]
...
package_dir =
     = src

Contents of package_dir is

{u'': u'src'}

(I've worked around this by manually reading config and patching this applying str() to keys and vars)

Python: 2.7
OS: GNU/Linux

The issue appears to be the same as for:

• ref Unfriendly error message when unicode is passed to package_dir or packages #190
• ref Ensure package name isn't unicode in Python2 distutils #597

[jensens]

I can confirm this problem.
I tried to empty the setup.py and use the declarative way with information in setup.cfg only.
This problem is the only stopper for me to use this way for Python 2. And since our packages shall support both, it is a stopper for Python 3 as well.

If setup.cfg contains:

package_dir = 
    = src

Under Python 2 the results values of the parsedict (from setuptools.config) are unicode strings:

>>> type(setuptools.config.read_configuration('setup.cfg')['options']['package_dir'][''])
<type 'unicode'>

While under Python 3

>>> type(setuptools.config.read_configuration('setup.cfg')['options']['package_dir'][''])
<class 'str'>

Which overall should be fine, but it is not. Under Python 2 a string <str> and not unicode seems to be expected.
I did not dig this down to distutils, but when modifing line 225 in setuptools.config to turn the type into a str with result[key.strip()] = str(val.strip()) all works fine.

[jaraco]

Rather than patching only setuptools.config, I'd like to see a patch for setuptools that allows for unicode to be used in setup.py as well. I thought the fix for #597 did that, but apparently not for all cases.

[benoit-pierre]

I believe #1062 is related. The problem with switching to Unicode for the results of reading the configuration is it will trips things like ensure_string or ensure_string_list in distutils when running under Python 2:
https://travis-ci.org/benoit-pierre/setuptools/jobs/292662535#L763

[eromoe]

I am using win_unicode_console to handle unicode print in cmd, seems relate,
got same error:

 pip install pymultitor

....

    d:\python27\lib\site-packages\win_unicode_console\__init__.py:31: RuntimeWarning: sys.stdin.enco
ding == 'utf-8', whereas sys.stdout.encoding == None, readline hook consumer may assume they are the
 same
      readline_hook.enable(use_pyreadline=use_pyreadline)
    error: 'egg_base' must be a directory name (got `pip-egg-info`)

[uchuugaka]

Seems this still blocks 3.x from Python 2.7.x does the issue in setuptools still persist?

[Midnighter]

I'm seeing this issue right now with Python 2.7.12 and

pip        10.0.1
setuptools 39.1.0
wheel      0.31.0

what's the status of fixing this?