installation failled with accent in user name

[Alexander-Barth]

I am trying to help two students who failed to install Conda.jl. A manual miniconda installation to the directory c:\users\<username>\.julia\conda\3\ also failed. We see the following error in the miniconda installation log:

Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "concurrent\futures\process.py", line 368, in
_queue_management_worker
   File "multiprocessing\connection.py", line 251, in recv
TypeError: __init__() missing 1 required positional argument: 'msg'

Both students have a French accent in their username which seems to be an issue for conda (at least anaconda):

We recommend installing Anaconda or Miniconda into a directory that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and no spaces, such as C:\anaconda. Do not install into paths that contain spaces such as C:\Program Files or that include Unicode characters outside the 7-bit ASCII character set. This helps ensure correct operation and no errors when using any open-source tools in either Python 3 or Python 2 conda environments.

Could Conda.jl detect this issue and propose a work-around to the users? I cannot replicate the issue locally, but after reading build.jl it seems that setting ENV["CONDA_JL_HOME"] might be sufficient.

See also https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/10239

[stevengj]

See also https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/8662 … and also https://github.com/ContinuumIO/anaconda-issues/issues/716 for spaces in the path.

Yes, it seems feasible to print out a more friendly error message in Conda.install for paths that Anaconda doesn't like, just by checking isascii(path) && ' ' ∉ path.