[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ (original) (raw)

Adam Olsen rhamph at gmail.com
Fri Dec 5 03:32:22 CET 2008

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 6:14 PM, James Y Knight <foom at fuhm.net> wrote:

On Dec 4, 2008, at 6:39 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

I'm in favour of a different, fifth solution: 5) represent all environment variables in Unicode strings, including the ones that currently fail to decode. (then do the same to file names, then drop the byte-oriented file operations again) Yay, maybe we can have this whole discussion all over again! Let's bring out all the same arguments, come to no conclusion, and let it taper off unresolved, yet again! :) FWIW, I still agree with Martin that that's the most reasonable solution.

It died because nobody presented a viable solution, and I maintain no solution is possible. All suggestions involve arbitrary transformations that fail to round trip correctly at some point or another. They're simply about shuffling the failure around to somewhere the poster happens to like.

Please, if you have a new idea that doesn't have a failure mode, by all means post it. But don't resurrect a pointless bikeshed.

-- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus

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