Re: [TCLCORE] TIP 716 ready for comments

[Harald O. <har...@el...>]

Ashok,
thanks for the great initiative.
You are always our saver of preliminary decisions, like Size_t and 
ptrDiff_t.

I am personally trapped in two senses:
- my own printing dll's use 8 bit API and don't print German Umlauts 
(äöüÄÖÜ) any more.
- there is no way on Tcl 9 on the script level to find the system 
encoding of Tcl 8.6. So, sourcing files using "source -encoding native" 
is not possible, because "native" is not known on the script level. You 
mention a new command "[encoding user]" in an example. I suppose, this 
will solve this issue and "encoding user" will return what "encoding 
system" returns in 8.6.

About the TIP:
- GREAT !!!!
- describe "encoding user"
- On Windows, environment variables are less comment. As a consequence, 
using an environment variable for the default set of "exec -encoding" 
is, at least, strange on Windows. This is a minor point. IMHO it is aso 
a security risk, that an application does not work as expected due to 
external influence.

Thanks for ALL !
Harald

Am 14.04.2025 um 06:51 schrieb apnmbx-public--- via Tcl-Core:
> TIP 716: New command "encoding user", remove UTF-8 manifest setting on 
> Windows <https://core.tcl-lang.org/tips/doc/trunk/tip/716.md> is ready 
> for comments. It proposes reversion of a change made in 9.0 to tclsh and 
> wish Windows manifests while keeping compatibility with 9.0.{0,1}.
> 
> Apologies for my usual verbosity, but when I brought this up in the 
> mailing list prior to the previous release, the comments wandered into 
> why UTF-8 should be the default. I've tried to better explain that is 
> not the issue.
> 
> I will point out that the original change to the manifest, which made 
> UTF-8 the default on Win 10 1903+ and Win 11, should have been TIP'ed as 
> it overrides user settings and is a change in behavior of a public API 
> and command. It's water under the bridge now that 9.0 has shipped so the 
> TIP maintains status quo and only changes the implementation. It also 
> adds a new /encoding user/ command and an /-encoding/ option to /exec / 
> as a workaround for compatibility issues introduced by forcing a UTF-8 
> default.
> 
> Note the implementation in the tip-716 branch is mostly complete but not 
> ready for review. I am only looking for comments on the proposal before 
> proceeding further with tests and docs.
> 
> /Ashok
>