[tex-live] User names too longs or with diacritics on Windows

[Philip TAYLOR]

Zdenek Wagner wrote:

> There are IMHO two design bugs in Windows:
> 
> 1. Automatic generation of short names. It is near to impossible to
> predict whether the suffix will be ~1, ~2, ... From the programmer's
> point of view (I am not a Windows programmer so that I cannot give
> precise details) there are two APIs, one is able to use the real long
> name, another can only use the short name
> 
> 2. Usage of different encodings in GUI and cmd. This stems from MS
> DOS. For instance, in Czech locale CP852 is used in cmd (as in the old
> MS DOS) but CP1250 in GUI. If you type Czech document in Notepad, it
> will be in CP1250. Nowadays several Windows text editor can use even
> UTF8. If you open cmd prompt and display it by "type", it will be
> wrong because CP852 is expected. I suspect that French Windows expect
> CP850 in the cmd prompt and something else in GUI and kpsea library.

I do not dispute that there may be design bugs in Windows
in this area, but the behaviour of KPSEwhich is inconsistent
with other command-level utilities.  KPSEwhich returns the
strings reported in the earlier message; DIR/S, on the other
hand, returns what one would expect with no character
substitutions :

D:\Users>dir /s Cécile.txt
 Volume in drive D is Data
 Volume Serial Number is E0B8-250B

 Directory of D:\Users\Cécile

13/04/2013  11:47                13 Cécile.txt
               1 File(s)             13 bytes

     Total Files Listed:
               1 File(s)             13 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  55,877,554,176 bytes free

D:\Users>

** Phil.