[p4dti-discussion] P4DTI - Job bugXXXX overwritten by issue XXXX

[Brent Browning]

We have been happily using P4DTI for years now.  Recently we have been
hit by the UnicodeDecodeError problem where Bugzilla users enter
non-ASCII characters in their bug reports and P4DTI fails to poll with:

(P4DTI-891X)  Error (exceptions.UnicodeDecodeError): 'ascii' codec can't
decode byte 0x91 in position 119: ordinal not in range(128)

There must be a fix that allows Unicode characters to be present in
Perforce or strips out the non ASCII characters and ignores them in the
comparison.  This might be related to the real problem or not.

The real problem we have today is that P4DTI has gone runaway.  That is,
we are getting a TON of messages like this:

(P4DTI-8410)  Defect tracker issue '5239' and Perforce job 'bug5239'
have both changed since the last time the replicator polled the
databases.  The replicator's conflict resolution policy decided to
overwrite the job with the issue.

I have seen 160 in the past hour and had to shutdown P4DTI.  I checked
the bugs and jobs in question and no one is making changes on either
side.

What gives?

- Brent