[Python-Dev] File system path encoding on Windows

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Steve Dower writes:

 > * Stephen sees "no reason not to change locale.getpreferredencoding()" 
 > (default encoding for open()) at the same time with the same switches, 
 > while I'm not quite as confident. Do users generally specify an encoding 
 > these days? I know I always put utf-8 there.

I was insufficiently specific.  "No reason not to" depends on separate
switches for file system encoding and preferred encoding.  That makes
things somewhat more complicated for implementation, and significantly
so for users.