GNU bug report logs - #67540
29.1; Emacs on Windows incorrectly capitalizes some environment variables

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Message #25 received at 67540 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Dave Abrahams <dave <at> boostpro.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: jporterbugs <at> gmail.com, 67540 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#67540: 29.1;
 Emacs on Windows incorrectly capitalizes some environment variables
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2023 12:34:40 -0800

You’re saying that these are ported UNIX programs that are only designed to work from inside of Emma, which has changed the spelling of the environment variable names?

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 30, 2023, at 11:14 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>> From: Dave Abrahams <dave <at> boostpro.com>
>> Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 16:13:03 -0800
>> Cc: Jim Porter <jporterbugs <at> gmail.com>,
>> 67540 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
>> 
>> It might be nice for Emacs to preserve the case of any existing
>> environment variables on MS-Windows to be on the safe side though...
>> 
>> That's impossible in practice: we'd need to "fix" every single Lisp
>> program and every place in the Emacs C code that compare against
>> "PATH" case-sensitively.  And what about user confusion, for those of
>> us who mostly work on Unix, but sometimes need to work on Windows?
>> 
>> I don't think this is that hard to fix without breaking anybody.  Simply maintain a mapping of in-Emacs
>> upcased environment variable names to the lowercased counterparts from which they came, and
>> map back when setting up a process environment.
> 
> This will not work reliably, because many programs invoked by Emacs as
> sub-processes are ported Unix and GNU/Linux programs, and those expect
> PATH, not Path in the environment.

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