Re: Non-ASCII characters in @include search path

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2022 22:23:04 +0000
> 
> Don't use the locale encoding by default for encoding filenames.

I think this is a mistake, and at least on Windows we must use the
locale's encoding of file names by default (unless Perl has the
ability to support the entire Unicode range of characters in file
names on Windows -- does it?).

As a data point: Emacs uses the locale's codeset as the default
file-name encoding for the last 15 years, on all supported systems,
and we have yet to hear about any significant problems with that.  (On
MS-Windows, we switched to UTF-8 several years ago, but that required
to write replacements for every libc API that accepts file names, and
in that replacement to convert from UTF-8 to UTF-16, then call the
corresponding "wide" API that can accept wchar_t strings as file
names.)

I think @documentencoding is only relevant for file names that come
from the Texinfo source, and it's only relevant for _decoding_ those
file names into the internal representation.  When encoding them
before passing them to file-related APIs, those file names should be
encoded using the locale's encoding (by default).  IOW,
@documentencoding just tells us how the file names are encoded in the
document, not how they are encoded in the filesystem.