[1.7] codepage:utf removal and python

[David Rothenberger]

I came across a problem today with Cygwin 1.7 while using rdiff-backup, 
which is a Python program. I have a directory with a file having a 
non-ASCII character in the name. rdiff-backup was unable to backup that 
directory.

When codepage:utf was supported, this worked fine. Now, it fails, even 
when I have LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in my environment. It all boils down to 
this python code:

   import os
   os.listdir('.')

(That's an example I run from within the directory.) This fails with an 
error

   OSError: [Errno 138] Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide 
character: '.'

unless one does this first:

   import locale
   locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')

I've patched rdiff-backup to do this, but I'm still wondering if this is 
the correct thing to do. I know that on my Linux machine, I don't have 
to do this, but I'm not sure if that's because there's some default 
locale that's being picked up by Python from somewhere other than the 
environment.

To sum it up: Is this a bad unintended consequence of removing codepage:utf?

-- 
David Rothenberger  ----  daveroth@acm.org

Truthful, adj.:
         Dumb and illiterate.
                 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"


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