[Call for testers] Pharo Launcher 1.4.5

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[Call for testers] Pharo Launcher 1.4.5

Guillermo Polito
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.


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