[RFC] decoding environment variables to unicode? (was: bugfix #131100)

[Alexander Belchenko]

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My patch for #131100 reveal one hidden bug with show_version.
If I have BZR_HOME env variable set to non-ascii value,
then current bzr.dev show it as is (and probably in wrong encoding),
but with my patch it throws UnicodeDecodeError, because config.config_dir()
returns non-ascii plain string. This is very rare case, and I stepped
into it only because I try to unicodize BZR_HOME in test cases.

In module win32utils I have special function _ensure_unicode()
that decode plain strings to unicode with user encoding.

What the best way to handle this case:

1) convert location of config dir to unicode in config_dir() function?
But how to handle non-windows platforms? Is it OK to use _ensure_unicode
for them?

2) convert location of config dir to unicode only in show_version()
function? Is it OK to use win32utils._ensure_unicode on non-win32
platforms? (in this case I need to move this function to osutils, IMO).

3) ignore this case until bug report from real users will be filed?


I think that variant 1 is wrong and vulnerable on non-win32 platforms.
And variant 3 here only because I think it's very very very rare case.

Any comments?

[µ]
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