Unicode entries on sys.path

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Thomas Heller wrote:
> How should these patches be approached?  

Please have a look as to how posixmodule.c and fileobject.c deal with
this issue.

> On windows, it would probably
> be easiest to use the MS generic text routines: _tcslen instead of
> strlen, for example, and to rely on the _UNICODE preprocessor symbol to
> map this function to strlen or wcslen.

No. This fails for two reasons:
1. We don't compile Python with _UNICODE, and never will do so. This
    macro is only a mechanism to simplify porting code from ANSI APIs
    to Unicode APIs, so you don't have to reformulate all the API calls.
    For new code, it is better to use the Unicode APIs directly if you
    plan to use them.
2. On Win9x, the Unicode APIs don't work (*). So you need to chose at
    run-time whether you want to use wide or narrow API. Unless
    a) we ship two binaries in the future, one for W9x, one for NT+
       (I hope this won't happen), or
    b) we drop support for W9x. I'm in favour of doing so sooner or
       later, but perhaps not for Python 2.5.

Regards,
Martin

(*) Can somebody please report whether the *W file APIs fail on W9x
because the entry points are not there (so you can't even run the
binary), or because they fail with an error when called?