[xmonad] why spawn (and safeSpawn, etc) use encodeString?

[Platon Pronko]

Unfortunately I do not have access to many different systems - only the one I use now, Arch Linux. So I won't be able to test it thoroughly. But as a data point - on my machine Prompt returns UTF8 and that UTF8 can be safely passed into the executeFile call, without encodeString.

Best regards,
Platon Pronko

On 2020-04-17 22:37, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> As one of the people responsible for that, the backstory is that at
> the time very long ago (2008?), it wasn't clear how to handle Unicode
> text in a cross-distro bugfree way while passing through a Haskell
> library like XMonad from a Prompt into X11 or the shell or
> applications, no one had the appetite to make an in-depth study of the
> various systems to figure out what exactly had to be done to handle
> ASCII & Unicode in a way that would be safe everywhere, and
> `encodeString` seemed to sorta work in most cases and be better that
> what came before.
> 
> Since the Haskell and other ecosystems have gradually continued
> evolving (one hopes), it's possible that many Unicode-related issues
> have since quietly vanished, and XMonad could do something simpler and
> more correct than it does now; but one would need to investigate
> thoroughly on a couple systems before one could be sure it was safe to
> update `spawn` and all downstream users of `encodeString` etc, and no
> one has been willing to do so to the extent to make a change in the
> (generally very stable) HEAD.
>