Subject: Re: bug#76525: Warnings given when emacs is installed in a directory containing non-ASCII characters on Windows

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:51:55 +0200

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> From: [email-masked]
> Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 01:26:31 +0100
> 
> I installed this special build into C:\Users\שזדס\scoop\apps\emacs-kiennq-ucrt-mps\current.
>  
> Running the official Windows binary from GNU's FTP site (specifically
> "https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-30/emacs-30.1.zip"),
> yields the following errors in the console:
> Warning: arch-dependent data dir 'c:/Users/Ã—Â©Ã—â€
> “Ã—â€œÃ—Â¡/scoop/apps/emacs/current/libexec/emacs/30.1/x86_64-w64-mingw32/': No such file or
> directory
> Warning: arch-independent data dir 'c:/Users/Ã—Â©Ã—â€
> “Ã—â€œÃ—Â¡/scoop/apps/emacs/current/share/emacs/30.1/etc/': No such file or directory
> Warning: Lisp directory 'c:/Users/Ã—Â©Ã—â€
> “Ã—â€œÃ—Â¡/scoop/apps/emacs/current/share/emacs/30.1/lisp': No such file or directory
>  
> and shows an error window preventing launch (see attatchment). The jumble of characters is supposed to
> be שזדס.
>  
> Also, my current codepage obtained through chcp shows "Active code page: 65001"

Ah, that explains everything: you have turned on the experimental
Windows feature of using UTF-8 as the system codepage.  This triggers
a known bug (bug#75207), which is currently only fixed in what will
become Emacs 31.  Maybe we should backport it to the Emacs 30 branch,
so that Emacs 30.2 will have it.

To solve this issue, try changing your system codepage so that it is
one of the ANSI 125x codepages, not UTF-8.