Re: environment variable don't get coding conversion

[Dave Love]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> "Make non-ASCII usable" is not specific enough for me to understand.
> I cannot be sure if there is a real problem.

Can't you leave it up to handa, then?

> Please show me a specific problem case so I can judge if there is a
> significant problem.

I don't understand how these aren't specific enough, but it's
obviously not right to treat environment variables as unibyte in a
multibyte session.

>     If you have a non-ASCII variable name, you can't sensibly use M-x
>     getenv with it;
> 
> getenv could decode the variable name, if that is useful.
> 
>                   if you have your non-ASCII personal name in NAME,
>     Emacs gets your `user-full-name' as a unibyte string with which random
>     things will happen;
> 
> Please show specific examples so I can judge whether these are real problems
> and, if so, look for solutions.

You could try non-ASCII variable names and values in the environment
with an appropriate locale.  The solution is either to have
setenv/getenv do coding conversion, or to do conversion both on the
imported environment and the one exported to subprocesses.