Re: [TCLCORE] CFV: TIP #716

[Poor Y. <org...@po...>]

On 2025-05-26 21:02, apnmbx-public--- via Tcl-Core wrote:
> This is a Call For Votes for TIP 716: New command "encoding user", 
> remove
> UTF-8 manifest setting on Windows

During the discussions of TIP 816 it became clear that it was a mistake 
to
change the manifest such that the process encoding is hard-coded to 
utf-8.  The
purpose of the change was never clarified, and it seems that the change 
did not
accomplish anything useful.  On the other hand, the change makes Tcl
incompatible with shared libraries that can't handle utf-8.  This change 
was a
mistake and should be reverted.

TIP 816 however goes further and introduces a new function,
Tcl_GetEncodingNameForUser().  This adds cognitive load, and I don't 
think it's
worth it.  If implemented to take the relevant values from the
environment/registory/platform into account,
Tcl_GetEncodingNameFromEnvironment() is sufficient,  and in that case 
[encoding
system] is also sufficient, even for the [exec -encoding] case.

I think that TIP 816 should be simplified to merely revert the change to 
the
manifest, with other improvements like [exec -encoding] moved to a 
separate
TIP.  As has been discussed, just reverting the change to the manifest 
would
mean an incompatibility between Tcl 9.0 and Tcl 9.1, but it's one that 
is
relatively easily dealt with by giving notice to users that 
compatibility with
Tcl 9.0 can be restored via [encoding system utf-8].

-- 
Yorick