Re: getpwent, user-full-name and utf-8

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
>> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:58:08 +0100
>> 
>> I propose that we bite the bullet, assume a fixed external system
>> encoding of utf-8 for such strings, and recode accordingly.
>
> I'd rather assume that usernames are encoded in the locale's
> encoding, not necessarily in UTF-8.

That assumes that every user operates under the same locale, and that
this locale agrees with the locale of the system files.  In particular
on multi-user machines, that is not realistic.

It might be reasonable to add a new variable to hold the system locale
which should not depend on the user locale.  However, it is somewhat
late for this.  Clearly, assuming emacs-mule encoding for the system,
as it now appears the case, is always wrong.

For current systems, assuming utf-8 will likely be correct most of the
time, at least.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum