Note that the *only* change Antoine's patch makes is that:
- *if* the locale encoding is ASCII (or an alias for ASCII)
- *then* Python sets the filesystem encoding to UTF-8 instead
If the locale encoding is anything *other* than ASCII, then that will still be used as the filesystem encoding, so environments that use something other than ASCII for the C locale will retain their current behaviour.
The rationale for this approach is based on the assumption that the *most likely* way to get a locale encoding of ASCII at this point in time is to use "LANG=C" on a system where the locale encoding is normally something more suited to a Unicode world (likely UTF-8).
Will assuming utf-8 sometimes cause problems? Quite possibly. But assuming that the platform's claim to only support ASCII is correct causes serious usability problems, too.