[Catalyst] Encoding problem - ?fastcgi?

[Richard Robinson]

I got my all-singing all-dancing Catalyst app onto a proper server a few
days ago. It's all going much better than I thought it might, a couple of
friendly guinea-pigs, a fine crop of helpful comments, glitches getting
spotted & fixed, a thriving TODO list ... and one problem which worries me -
I prefer bugs to be in my code, because then I can fix them and end of
story, but I don't think this is.

There is a point where I send data out as a variety of other mime-types.
This is either text, in a small range of iso-8859 encodings (I work in utf8
internally, "of course", so this is encoded specifically). or binary,
generated from that text as a temporary file by external programs and read
in from that. This is output with, eg,

$c->res->content_type('application/pdf');
$c->res->body($data);

Developing & testing this on my machine at home, this works as it should. On
the remote server, I can view the files directly, and they're as they should
be; I can request the data through :3000 from script/appname_server.pl, and
again, it's correct; but hand it out through script/appname_fastcgi.pl +
mod_fastcgi/apache and it's broken; each single byte with the high bit set
is replaced by a "0xC3 0xsomethingelse" pair - it's been recoded into utf8,
with values that assume it was Latin 1 to start with (regardless of anything
I put in the Content-Type). Workaround is to replace the code above with a
redirect to the temporary file, which then goes out through Static::Simple
and arrives uncorrupted.

The data leaves my code with the utf8 flag unset, and is handled properly by
C::P::Unicode. So I think it must be in the fastcgi conversation ? Has
anybody else seen this, or have any ideas ?  I can't see any changes in
C::E::FastCGI.pm that offer any Clue, and I'm really not sure where to go
next.

System at home, where it doesn't happen, is Apache/2.0.54 with Catalyst
modules from, I think, last January or thereabout (the new Debian stable
caught me by suprise, bringing the home box up to date is going to be a big
job & I have other things I'd rather be doing).  Remote system, where it
does happen, is Apache/2.2.3 with cpan upgrade a few days ago. mod_fastcgi
is the same on both (2.4.2)


The site is
http://livetunebook.qualmograph.org.uk
just in case anybody wants a look. "Traditional" tunes.

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem