Subject: bug#16667: Accented home dir stops ELPA package

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2014 08:50:22 -0500

> Was that letter representable by the current Windows system codepage?

I assume so, since Emacs works at least to some extend and was able to
access some of the files in that user's directory, as evidenced by the
message-log I sent in my previous message.

> If so, I don't think this is the problem.  If it wasn't representable,
> such a directory cannot be used on Windows with Emacs 24.3.

He tested the same procedure after creating another user with home dir
"/Users/LMC" and the problem disappeared, so the accent looks like
a good explanation.

>> we see the last line has an improperly (en/de)coded utf-8 sequence.
> Hmm... can you tell which code called autoload-find-file?

It's called from autoload-generate-file-autoloads itself called from
package-generate-autoloads via update-directory-autoloads.

A possible explanation is if the `directory-files' call in
update-directory-autoloads (which requests full names, so the output
file names include the "c:/Users/Propriétaire.AlienwareCedric/"
prefix) returns mis-encoded names.  E.g. prepends default-directory but
marks the result as unibyte, or something.

>> Is it already fixed in trunk?
> The trunk uses an entirely different machinery for non-ASCII file
> names on Windows, so it's hard to tell.

Indeed, which is why I wonder if it might be fixed already.

> But we did fix quite a few problems related to building and running
> Emacs from non-ASCII directories, so maybe this was one of them.

That's right.  Could someone try to reproduce the problem in 24.3 and
then see if it's fixed in trunk?

        Stefan