rake db:migrate aborted! on US-ASCII using rake 0.9.2.2 and rails 3.0.10 - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

Recently I upgraded my gems and started adding new stuff to my app like authentication by third party social websites using omniauth gem. On development environment everything is fine and works like a charm.
I am deploying to staging and production servers using capistrano. Basic deployment is fine and working so far, but I have got really strange problems when I want to do migrations when deploying.
I get the following error messages from capistrano:
[my.server.com] executing command
*** [err :: my.server.com] rake aborted!
*** [err :: my.server.com] "\xC5" on US-ASCII
*** [err :: my.server.com]
*** [err :: my.server.com] (See full trace by running task with --trace)
command finished in 2472ms
I was googling all around and couldn't find any relevant solution. I also tried to downgrade rake gem back to 0.8.7 but with no success on the end - the same errors.

Answer 1

After hours of googling and digging in I found the solution that (I hope) may by helpful for someone with a similar or the same problem.
I did bundle exec rake --trace db:migrate on the staging server and got the following error messages:
rake aborted!
"\xC5" on US-ASCII
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/releases/20111230233802/config/application.rb:5:in `read'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/releases/20111230233802/config/application.rb:5:in `<top (required)>'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/releases/20111230233802/Rakefile:4:in `require'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/releases/20111230233802/Rakefile:4:in `<top (required)>'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/rake_module.rb:25:in `load'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/rake_module.rb:25:in `load_rakefile'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/application.rb:501:in `raw_load_rakefile'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/application.rb:82:in `block in load_rakefile'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/application.rb:133:in `standard_exception_handling'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/application.rb:81:in `load_rakefile'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/application.rb:65:in `block in run'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/application.rb:133:in `standard_exception_handling'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/lib/rake/application.rb:63:in `run'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rake-0.9.2.2/bin/rake:33:in `<top (required)>'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/bin/rake:19:in `load'
/var/www/myapp/test.myapp.com/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/bin/rake:19:in `<main>'
So I jumped in to the config/application.rb file to find out what could rise the error. Line 5 of that file loads an external config file:
require 'yaml'
APP_CONFIG = YAML.load(File.read(File.expand_path('../app_config.yml', __FILE__)))
and that external file contains UTF-8 chars, not US-ASCII. So I tried a couple of different solutions to solve that problem.
The only one which worked for me was to add an extra few lines of code on top of config/application.rb file:
if RUBY_VERSION =~ /1.9/
Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8
end
just to tell rake to load external files using utf-8 encoding. After that change everything went smooth and exactly as expected. Problem solved!
PS.
I really don't know why developers of rake 0.9 have changed previous behavior of rake 0.8 which worked fine for me and probably for you as well for a long time. Maybe you have an idea why? I am very curious.