1.7.0-48: [BUG] Passing characters above 128 from bash command line

[Edward Lam]

Hi Alexey,

Thanks for explaining the UTF8 changes in cygwin 1.7. However, the 
decision to use UTF-8 for the C locale is questionable.

It seems to me that it would be much safer to use the SYSTEM DEFAULT 
code page (ie. the return value of the system GetACP() function) for 
CYGWIN instead, ensuring compatibility for the large class native 
Windows applications that are non-Unicode, non-CodePage aware.

Reading the original mailing list threads now, it seems like Corinna 
Vinschen also mentioned this using the system code page[1]. I tried to 
dig through the various mails in that thread didn't find any good 
objection to it.

 > The only bug here is that the arguments are truncated instead of using
 > some kind of a replacement character, is it related to some posix
 > complience, like with wprintf?

I think it's very bad that changing LANG can result in a truncated 
*command line*, that has nothing to do with printf. The printf in the 
code was just for testing. The HUGE bug is that the application gets the 
  WRONG NUMBER OF ARGUMENTS.

1. http://www.mail-archive.com/cygwin@cygwin.com/msg96843.html

Regards,
-Edward

Alexey Borzenkov wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Edward Lam <edward@sidefx.com> wrote:
>> I think there is still a bug here? I set LANG=C, then shouldn't be just NOT
>> doing any encoding, thus work? If I do this on Linux, it works. If I use a
>> cygwin compiled app, it also works.
> 
> On Linux, internally, system uses multibyte strings (it is encoding
> agnostic even), but on Windows, system uses unicode strings, so cygwin
> has to decode your byte sequences somehow to pass them to non-cygwin
> processes as unicode (the fact that cygwin now understands unicode is
> a huge plus to me). In earlier discussions it was decided that cygwin
> C locale should use utf-8 encoding, because file system internally
> uses unicode it's the safest default to represent all possible
> filenames, etc. In previous cygwin versions, your byte sequences were
> just silently converted using your system's codepage (by the system
> itself, even), so if you want the old behavior you should set
> LANG=en_US.CP1252.
> 
> The only bug here is that the arguments are truncated instead of using
> some kind of a replacement character, is it related to some posix
> complience, like with wprintf?
> 
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