Hi all,

We have been working these last ~two weeks with Christophe on the stability
of the launcher. We have prepared version 1.4.5, and we would like to have
some feedback.

http://files.pharo.org/pharo-launcher/1.4.5

So, we would really LOVE, if somebody can play with this version and send
us feedback. Specially, if your username in your machine has characters
that encoded take more than 1 byte, we really would like your feedback. We
have tested with japanese characters, and others like î,ü, etc, but the
more the better.

The main focus was on:
 - correct management of encodings (in all platforms)
   - of environment variables
   - of files and paths
   - of commands called through OSProcess
 - better error management in case of edge cases (like when we cannot
determine the version of an image)

Just FYI: the major limitation of the launcher right now (and it was like
that since ever) is that we cannot call external processes with non-ascii
characters in windows. This happens because ProcessWrapper uses the ascii
version of the windows API to create a process.

With what we have learnt this week, we would like to push some of these
fixes to Pharo7 too soon:
 - Correct encoding/decoding of environment variables in linux/osx
 - Ability to access the encoded version of environment variables in
linux/osx to give users control over the encoding they want (or even access
binary data)
 - Correct encoding/decoding of environment variables in windows by using
the correct windows API (current primitiveGetenv in windows uses Ascii
version too...)

In the long term, we also need a solution to enhance or replace
ProcessWrapper using the W (wide) version of the windows API. But that is
far more work...

GC, Guille & Christophe

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