LANG, locale, unicode, setup.py and Debian packaging

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I have decided to keep the test for a decode error because files created under 
> different locales should not be written-to under the current one. I don't 
> know if one can mix encodings in a single text file, but I don't have time to 
> find out.

Of course it's *possible*. However, you need to have a detailed format
specification to make it feasible. For example, in a font file, you
could specify that the font name is in UTF-8, the vendor name is in
Latin-1, and the description is in UTF-16, but it would be really stupid
to specify such a format (not that this would stop people from
specifying such formats - in ZIP files, some file names are encoded in
CP437 and some in UTF-8, depending on a per-filename flag).

Regards,
Martin