SSID gets treated as UTF-8 character sequence

[cgaray]

Sugar is unable to handle Access Points that have non-UTF-8 SSIDs. The name doesn't get displayed in the Neighborhood; the user is unable to connect to the Access Point by clicking on the AP icon.

This happens with any version of Sugar so far. cgaray originally tested Sugar 0.82 / OLPC OS build 801, Sugar 0.84 / OLPC OS build 170py, Sugar 0.84 / OLPC OS build 179py.

Recent versions of Sugar may even trigger a segfault in glib.markup_escape_text() (see e.g.  OLPC#11698).

[cgaray]

1276621138.215026 ERROR root: No gsm connection was set in GConf.
None
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/sugar/graphics/palette.py:241: GtkWarning: Failed to set text from markup due to error parsing markup: Error en la línea 1, carácter 18: Texto codificado como UTF-8 inválido; «<b>asunción</b>» no válido
  self._label.set_markup('<b>%s</b>' % label)
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/sugar/graphics/palette.py:131: GtkWarning: Failed to set text from markup due to error parsing markup: Error en la línea 1, carácter 18: Texto codificado como UTF-8 inválido; «<b>asunción</b>» no válido
  self.add(palette_box)
1276621184.817054 ERROR dbus.service: Unable to append ({'802-11-wireless': {'ssid': dbus.ByteArray('asunci\xf3n', variant_level=1), 'mode': 'infrastructure'}, 'connection': {'autoconnect': False, 'type': '802-11-wireless', 'id': 'Auto asunci\xf3n', 'uuid': '15533e97f9ec2d4538d8227edd74827a62c75060'}},) to message with signature a{sa{sv}}: <type 'exceptions.UnicodeError'>: String parameters to be sent over D-Bus must be valid UTF-8
1276621190.007076 ERROR root: Failed to activate connection: org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.UnknownConnection: Connection was not provided by any settings service 

[sascha_silbe]

Related issue: #2099 (special characters in SSID not escaped)

[fran]

It looks like the problem is the use of encodings other than UTF-8 (of which ASCII is a strict subset). Cgaray's SSID is named 'asunci\xf3n' - this is 'asunción' in Latin-1, but invalid UTF-8, hence the UnicodeError in the log above.

This is more complicated than the purely cosmetic bug #2099 - it looks like NetworkManager is itself choking on the non-UTF-8 SSID, since D-Bus requires UTF-8 strings. (Cgaray, are you still able to connect to the network, even though the SSID doesn't render?)

There's also no reliable way to consistently detect which encoding is in use, so while it's important that Sugar/NetworkManager be able to _connect_ to non-UTF-8 SSIDs, it's unlikely that SSIDs with other encodings will ever be rendered properly in the interface without compromising Unicode support.

[cgaray]

Cgaray, are you still able to connect to the network, even though the SSID doesn't render?
No, the XO won't connect.

[bernie]

Does it also choke in Gnome? I seem to remember that it was working.

Perhaps we could catch the unicode error and render something meaningful anyway?

[erikos]

As far as I have seen network-manager-applet is using nm_utils_ssid_to_utf8 [1] from NM to render the SSID to something displayable.

[1]  http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/tree/libnm-util/nm-utils.c#n306

[erikos]

I closed #1735 as a dup of this issue as there is more info in here.

[erikos]

Please see  http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/11698 for the latest assesment of the situation. When we port the shell we would like to use "nm_utils_ssid_to_utf8" from libnm to handle the guessing of the AP name.

[sascha_silbe]

Fix landed as  7f8ba95 in master. Keeping the ticket open while the  backport to Sugar 0.94 is getting tested.

[erikos]

#3451 will track the porting to use "nm_utils_ssid_to_utf8" from libnm.

[erikos]

Fix landed in 0.94  http://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar/mainline/commit/117b2855241377e774382054a13246cd487448a8