[[!meta  title="Unicode `long_description` in `setup.py`"]]

I've been trying to figure out how to setup Unicode long descriptions
in `setup.py`.  I often use Unicode in my `README` files and then use
the contents of the `README` to set the long description with
something like:

    …
    _this_dir = os.path.dirname(__file__)
    …
    setup(
        …
        long_description=codecs.open(
            os.path.join(_this_dir, 'README'), 'r', encoding='utf-8').read(),
        )

This crashed in Python 2.7 with a `UnicodeDecodeError` when I tried to
register the package on PyPI.  The problem is that packages are
checked before registration to avoid being registered with broken
metadata, and Unicode handling was broken in distutils ([bug
13114][bug13114]).  Unfortunately, there haven't yet been Python
releases containing the fixes (applied in October 2011).

How do you work around this issue until get a more recent Python 2.7?
Just use Python 3.x, where Unicode handling is much cleaner.  You may
need hide Python-3-incompatible code inside:

    if _sys.version_info < (3,0):

blocks, but you shouldn't be pulling in huge amounts of code for
`setup.py` anyway.

[bug13114]: http://bugs.python.org/issue13114

[[!tag tags/python]]