Re: environment variable don't get coding conversion

[Dave Love]

[Sorry if this is a duplicate -- I've had trouble sending out over the
weekend.]

"Ehud Karni" <address@hidden> writes:

> You have to use the encoded Hebrew name, i.e.
>   (getenv (encode-coding-string "Hmy" 'hebrew-iso-8bit))

I hope you're not suggesting people _should_ do that!

> I agree that to use non-ASCII environment variable name is not
> practical,

I'm trying to get it made practical for Emacs users.  Why should they
be restricted to ASCII names?

> so this problem is not really important, but the non-ASCII
> values are used a lot, and the practical way for ISO-8859-x is to
> have them in unibyte.

I don't know what that means, but please avoid talking about specific
charsets or classes of them like 8859.  Even if you're only concerned
with Hebrew, presumably you might also want to use it encoded as
windows-1255 or utf-8.  Anyway, things like this should simply work
for any supported encoding.

> The `process-environment' can hold the values in multibyte but 
> `child_setup' and `getenv_internal' (in callproc.c) should transform
> the values to unibyte (or whatever necessary for other coding systems
> like CJK and utf-8).

This sounds confused.  If `process-environment' is stored decoded, as
handa suggests, then it has to be encoded for subprocesses in
`locale-coding-system'.  The encoded value is implicitly unibyte.