i18n and file systems

[Martin Pool]

On 13 Dec 2005, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> Martin is currently disabling the specific test when it can't run (which
> is appropriate here).

Done now: tests can raise TestSkipped if they discover they can't
actually run.  (This is only part of the spec covering this; we can add
more exceptions and other nuances later.)

I agree with the tests you'd like to add.

> But it raises an interesting discussion we've kindof ignored. Firstly
> the background:
> 
> Some file systems/platforms are unicode through and through - no matter
> what your terminal encoding is, the file system can still represent and
> return an unicode path. (Whether python figures this out and uses the
> appropriate apis is a good question). Examples are NTFS(on win32)
> (IIRC), and HFS+(with MacOSX). Lets call this unicode safe.

Linux can approximate this by just declaring that all applications
*must* pass utf-8 to filesystem calls (or they're broken.)  Or rather, a
particular distribution could make such a statement. 

This suggests users might want all paths to be expressed in UTF-8, even
if they want their terminal and their file contents in ascii or 8859-1.

-- 
Martin
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