How to restore a project to functionality after pushing a branch with non-ASCII UTF-8 characters

[adamnovak]

Our project had some UTF-8 characters in branch names. Since according to #1822, these aren't allowed in branch names, I've removed them. But even after running a new build of my project, the Versions page remains inaccessible and Admin -> Versions still features the old, removed, UTF-8 branch.

This is not a duplicate of #1410; that issue deals with proper support for UTF-8 characters in branch names, while this issue deals with the correct recovery procedure for fixing a project that has had unsupported UTF-8 characters in its branch names.

Details

• Project URL: https://readthedocs.org/projects/vg/
• Read the Docs username (if applicable): adamnovak

Expected Result

New branches should show up under Admin -> Versions immediately after the next successful build, now that no branch names on the Github repo contain UTF-8 characters. Also, the main "Versions" button for the project should return a page full of versions.

Actual Result

New branches are still not appearing under Admin -> Versions after a successful build, and the old, invalidly-named branches are still there. The main "Versions" page still just has an error message saying "Fail. Check back in a bit!".

[ericholscher]

I fixed this for your project by deleting the version, but the issue seems to be in the packaging library we're using for version comparison. Full traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/docs/bin/gunicorn", line 11, in <module>
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/app/wsgiapp.py", line 74, in run
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/app/base.py", line 185, in run
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/app/base.py", line 71, in run
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/arbiter.py", line 176, in run
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/arbiter.py", line 477, in manage_workers
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/arbiter.py", line 541, in spawn_workers
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/arbiter.py", line 507, in spawn_worker
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/workers/base.py", line 120, in init_process
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/workers/sync.py", line 44, in run
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/workers/sync.py", line 93, in handle
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/gunicorn/workers/sync.py", line 139, in handle_request
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/newrelic-2.76.0.55/newrelic/api/web_transaction.py", line 738, in __iter__
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/newrelic-2.76.0.55/newrelic/api/web_transaction.py", line 1114, in __call__
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/newrelic-2.76.0.55/newrelic/api/web_transaction.py", line 1242, in _nr_wsgi_application_wrapper_
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/handlers/wsgi.py", line 189, in __call__
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 132, in get_response
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/newrelic-2.76.0.55/newrelic/hooks/framework_django.py", line 503, in wrapper
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/views/decorators/csrf.py", line 58, in wrapped_view
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/rest_framework/viewsets.py", line 85, in view
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/newrelic-2.76.0.55/newrelic/hooks/component_djangorestframework.py", line 27, in _nr_wrapper_APIView_dispatch_
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/rest_framework/views.py", line 407, in dispatch
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/rest_framework/views.py", line 404, in dispatch
File "/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/readthedocs/restapi/views/model_views.py", line 112, in sync_versions
File "/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/readthedocs/projects/version_handling.py", line 169, in determine_stable_version
File "/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/readthedocs/projects/version_handling.py", line 144, in sort_versions
File "/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/readthedocs/projects/version_handling.py", line 110, in parse_version_failsafe
File "/home/docs/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/packaging/version.py", line 212, in __init__

[stsewd]

Hi, I just tested this on my local instance, when creating a branch like tílde or 😁-happy, the build fails immediately, no versions are created/updated (but I can access to versions or admin -> versions normally), when removing the branches and building again, everything is fine, if I add new valid branches these are listed.

So, was this problem fixed at some point?

[agjohnson]

It sounds like the original issue was resolved. I think we have some more work to do on git parsing of this information though. Closing this issue as we have a few already around utf8 support.