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[Python-Dev] PEP 529: Change Windows filesystem encoding to UTF-8

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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