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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Dec 12 09:57:20 CET 2008

Toshio Kuratomi writes:

Adam Olsen wrote:

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 6:55 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Unfortunately, even programmers experienced in I18N like Martin, and those with intuition-that-has-the-force-of-law like Guido, express deliberate disbelief on this point. They say that filesystem names and environment variable values are text, which is true from the semantic viewpoint but can't be fully supported by any implementation.

With all the focus on backup tools and file managers I think we've lost perspective. They're an important use case, but hardly the dominant one.

True.

Please, as a user, if your app is creating new files, do NOT use bytes! You have no excuse for creating garbage, and garbage doesn't help the user any. Getting the encoding right, use the unicode APIs, and don't pass the buck on to everything else.

Uhmmm.... That's good advice but doesn't solve any problems :-(.

Exactly. Furthermore, the problems already exist. My current locale is UTF-8 and all files dated since about 2002 have UTF-8 names, except in my MIME-bodies garbage can, where only recently have I got around to coercing my MUA to doing the right thing. And of course there are still legacy files names in EUC-JP, which I suppose I could search for but since I only access a directory containing one once in a pale blue moon, I'm not gonna bother.

It's just not reasonable to expect users or even sysadminns to go around cleaning up legacy data.

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