Message12758

Java insulates us from the encoding used for file names. As long as we see the file system exclusively through Java's operations, we can choose a conventional FS encoding. We choose UTF-8.

It may be that jnr.posix punctures this bubble. It would be the case I suppose if C (or CPython) made a directory listing in a file, that took a bytes approach to names, then we read that into Jython. In that case, you would need to know the FS encoding to transcode it to UTF-8. I think this will be a problem for very few people.

I agree there is a case for treating a badly-encoded sys.path entry (case 4 of your investigations) as no such directory, rather than surfacing the decoding error. I'm tentatively identifying it with 2.7.2.