windows unicode problem with cabal list

[guest]

C:\>cabal list dedukti

* dedukti

Synopsis: A type-checker for the cabal.EXE: <stdout>: invalid argument

 http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/dedukti/1.1.4/dedukti.cabal

"A type-checker for the λΠ-modulo calculus."

[duncan]

Hmm, apparently the default locale on Windows is not Unicode capable. That seems odd actually.

We'll need to take this up with the ghc devs.

[batterseapower]

The default console locale on Windows is CP850 which is most certainly not a Unicode superset. Try running "cabal list" from e.g. Cygwin's Mintty in a Unicode locale and you should get the right output.

Perhaps we could change the default CodingFailureMode? used to write to std{out,err} to TransliterateCodingFailure?, which would replace the invalid characters with "?". I'm just concerned that this might not be the right thing to do for all Haskell programs.

[duncan]

Ah ok, so perhaps we should just set that on stdout for the appropriate cabal commands. Have to think about what to do for --simple-output and similar flags designed for machine readable output. Tricky thing is that if they're consumed by a program or directed to a file then we almost certainly want utf8. If it's printed to the screen then we want the locale encoding and the forgiving ??? conversion mode.

So ideally we'd just set this once in main in cabal & Setup.hs and have the machine readable output commands do something special.

[kosmikus]

Also see #885.