Windows builds are failing with a utf encoding error

[choldgraf]

Our Windows builds are failing with some kind of encoding error. This seems to be related to the sphinx theme builder so we opened an issue to discuss and track there for now:

• build failing on windows-latest pradyunsg/sphinx-theme-builder#38

[choldgraf]

My feeling is that this should not block a release because I don't believe we introduced it and it likely affects other versions too - but if others disagree please say so!

[drammock]

We hit something like this recently in mne-python and @larsoner fixed it by setting env var PYTHONUTF8=1 on windows (I think). I haven't combed the CI log yet though so I'm not positive this is the same error. I'll check next week if nobody beats me to it

[12rambau]

@drammock I remembered this being solved in one of your PR, am I wrong ?

[drammock]

I fixed it for the CIs only. It is caused by the emoji in our README --- the README gets parsed as metadata during editable pip installs. The fix is to export the environment variable PYTHONUTF8=1 before doing the pip install on Windows, but I haven't looked yet into whether this is possible to do automatically for the user. The other, simpler fix is to remove the emoji from our README.