[Python-3000] [Python-Dev] Filename as byte string in python 2.6 or 3.0?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> This problem sure would be "practically" solved simply by switching the
> way the filesystemencoding is selected.

Great minds think alike :-) I just proposed a similar approach in the
tracker, with the following variations:
- applications can explicitly set the file system encoding. If they set
  it to Latin-1, they can access all files on a POSIX system.
- use private-use characters for unrepresentable bytes

For the second item, there was the immediate objection that this gives
conflicts in UTF-8, for which UTF-8b could be a good solution.

Regards,
Martin