LANG, locale, unicode, setup.py and Debian packaging

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> What happens if there is a filename that cannot be represented in it's 
> entirety? i.e. every character is 'replaced'. Does it simply vanish, or does 
> it appear as "?????????" ? :)

The latter. I did open(u"\u20ac\u20ac","w") in an UTF-8 locale, then did
"LANG=C ls", and it gave me ?????? (as the two characters use 6 bytes)

> I spent an hour trying to find a single file on the web that did *not* have 
> (what seemed like) ascii characters in it and failed. Even urls on Japanese 
> websites use western characters ( a tcp/ip issue I suspect).

Actually, an HTTP and URL issue. Non-ASCII URLs aren't really supported
in the web.

> I was hoping to 
> find a filename in Kanji (?) ending in .jpg or something so that I could 
> download it and see what my system (and Python) made of it.

Use a text editor instead to create such a file. For example, create
a new document, and save it as "活用事例.txt" (which Google says means
"casestudies.txt")

Regards,
Martin