Re: environment variable don't get coding conversion

[Richard Stallman]

    Does it really have to be more reliable than what we do with users'
    precious files?

Since it can easily be 100% reliable, it should be.

    In any case, at least we should IMHO consider whether getenv and
    setenv need to decode and encode the environment variables' values.

That's exactly what I've suggested.  That can do the user-level part
of this job in a way that cannot interfere with inheritance.
I recommend using locale-coding-system.

    > Therefore we have to leave these strings in their original format.

    If this is the final decision, we probably should tell Lisp
    programmers (in the ELisp manual) how to deal with such unibyte
    strings in text processing.

That is a good idea too.  It shouldn't take much text to do this.