[Python-Dev] PEP 529: Change Windows filesystem encoding to UTF-8 (original) (raw)

Random832 random832 at fastmail.com
Thu Sep 8 13:35:14 EDT 2016

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016, at 13:10, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 9:57 AM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote: > Bash on Windows is just Linux, so it isn't affected by any of this.

I don't know what that sentence means.

It means that the so-called "bash" on windows 10 is actually a full Ubuntu system (running on, AIUI, a simulation of Linux kernel system calls), which will presumably also have its own python installation and use a UTF-8 locale, rather than one that runs "natively" on win32.

If it's possible for a win32 version of python to call it as a subprocess, this may be an argument in favor of using UTF-8 - subject to finding out whether WSL does use UTF-8, whether it supports non-ASCII arguments from a Win32 CreateProcess at all, whether there's any way to pass non-UTF-8 arguments to it, etc.

Incidentally, according to https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/2, pipes didn't work at all between WSL processes and Win32 processes until two weeks ago, so it's clear that these features are still evolving.

But anyways, if someone wants to try making subprocess work with bytes arguments on Windows work, that's just a bugfix, and you're not constrained by how it works on previous Python versions (since it doesn't work there at all). It might be wise to choose an interpretation that's consistent with other uses of command line arguments by Python on Windows though (rather than choosing to favor making just bash work the same as it works on Linux).

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