Re: environment variable don't get coding conversion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 10:36:54 -0500
> 
> This would be true ordinarily, but here there is a more important
> factor.  The usual thing to do with environment variables is to pass
> them through.  Making sure that is solidly reliable is the highest
> priority for environment variables.

Does it really have to be more reliable than what we do with users'
precious files?  I'm not sure I see why the reliability of launching
subprocesses is more important than potential loss of information due
to incorrect decoding and encoding of user files.

In any case, at least we should IMHO consider whether getenv and
setenv need to decode and encode the environment variables' values.

> Therefore we have to leave these strings in their original format.

If this is the final decision, we probably should tell Lisp
programmers (in the ELisp manual) how to deal with such unibyte
strings in text processing.