Can't run catkin_make, can't resolve UnicodeDecodeError - ros

Question

this is driving me crazy, I already tried a lot of things,e.g. changing locale, but still getting this after workspace init and then doing catkin_make on subdir.
Running on a recent arch dist, ros-indigo, python2.7 and python 3.5 installed
johnny#localhost:~/ros$ catkin_make
Base path: /home/johnny/ros
Source space: /home/johnny/ros/src
Build space: /home/johnny/ros/build
Devel space: /home/johnny/ros/devel
Install space: /home/johnny/ros/install
####
#### Running command: "cmake /home/johnny/ros/src -DCATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX=/home/johnny/ros/devel -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/johnny/ros/install -G Unix Makefiles" in "/home/johnny/ros/build"
####
-- Using CATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX: /home/johnny/ros/devel
-- Using CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH: /opt/ros/indigo
-- This workspace overlays: /opt/ros/indigo
-- Using PYTHON_EXECUTABLE: /usr/bin/python
-- Using default Python package layout
-- Using empy: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py
-- Using CATKIN_ENABLE_TESTING: ON
-- Call enable_testing()
-- Using CATKIN_TEST_RESULTS_DIR: /home/johnny/ros/build/test_results
-- Found gtest: gtests will be built
CMake Warning at /opt/ros/indigo/share/catkin/cmake/test/nosetests.cmake:96 (message):
nosetests not found, Python tests can not be run (try installing package
'python3-nose')
Call Stack (most recent call first):
/opt/ros/indigo/share/catkin/cmake/all.cmake:147 (include)
/opt/ros/indigo/share/catkin/cmake/catkinConfig.cmake:20 (include)
CMakeLists.txt:52 (find_package)
-- catkin 0.6.18
-- BUILD_SHARED_LIBS is on
/opt/ros/indigo/share/catkin/cmake/em/order_packages.cmake.em:23: error: <class 'UnicodeDecodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 205: ordinal not in range(128)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 3302, in <module>
if __name__ == '__main__': main()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 3300, in main
invoke(sys.argv[1:])
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 3283, in invoke
interpreter.wrap(interpreter.file, (file, name))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 2295, in wrap
self.fail(e)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 2284, in wrap
callable(*args)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 2359, in file
self.safe(scanner, done, locals)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 2401, in safe
self.parse(scanner, locals)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 2421, in parse
token.run(self, locals)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 1425, in run
interpreter.execute(self.code, locals)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py", line 2595, in execute
_exec(statements, self.globals, locals)
File "<string>", line 17, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/catkin_pkg/topological_order.py", line 111, in topological_order
for path, package in find_packages(space).items():
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/catkin_pkg/packages.py", line 83, in find_packages
packages = find_packages_allowing_duplicates(basepath, exclude_paths=exclude_paths, exclude_subspaces=exclude_subspaces, warnings=warnings)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/catkin_pkg/packages.py", line 110, in find_packages_allowing_duplicates
packages[path] = parse_package(os.path.join(basepath, path), warnings=warnings)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/catkin_pkg/package.py", line 370, in parse_package
return parse_package_string(f.read(), filename, warnings=warnings)
File "/usr/lib/python3.5/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 205: ordinal not in range(128)
CMake Error at /opt/ros/indigo/share/catkin/cmake/safe_execute_process.cmake:11 (message):
execute_process(/home/johnny/ros/build/catkin_generated/env_cached.sh
"/usr/bin/python" "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/em.py" "--raw-errors"
"-F" "/home/johnny/ros/build/catkin_generated/order_packages.py" "-o"
"/home/johnny/ros/build/catkin_generated/order_packages.cmake"
"/opt/ros/indigo/share/catkin/cmake/em/order_packages.cmake.em") returned
error code 1
Call Stack (most recent call first):
/opt/ros/indigo/share/catkin/cmake/em_expand.cmake:25 (safe_execute_process)
/opt/ros/indigo/share/catkin/cmake/catkin_workspace.cmake:35 (em_expand)
CMakeLists.txt:63 (catkin_workspace)
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
See also "/home/johnny/ros/build/CMakeFiles/CMakeOutput.log".
See also "/home/johnny/ros/build/CMakeFiles/CMakeError.log".
Invoking "cmake" failed'
Thank you very much!

Answer 1

It looks like an unicode problem. In very brief summary, you have passed something that is being interpreted as a string of bytes to something that needs to decode it into Unicode characters, but the default codec (ascii) is failing.
More on this here.
there's a lot of solutions to this one. the one I suggest is doing this :
yassin#pc:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages# cat sitecustomize.py
# encoding=utf8
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
and to check if that works, you need to do the following :
yassin#pc:~/home# python
Python 2.7.6 (default, Dec 6 2013, 14:49:02)
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
>>> reload(sys)
<module 'sys' (built-in)>
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf8'
>>>
Hope it helps ! Cheers.

Answer 2

Set the system default locale to en_IN.utf8 should solve the problem.
For example, if you use bash, you can add below lines into your ~/.bashrc:
LANG=en_IN.utf8
export LANG
The catkin toolkit use system default locale to load message or service files.