On Linux, the "zip" command line program (InfoZIP zip program) only sets the unicode flag if it is able to set the locale to "en_US.UTF-8". It can do better: check if the locale encoding is UTF-8, and only "en_US.UTF-8" locale if the encoding was not UTF-8.

The conclusion is today, it is very hard to create archives using only UTF-8 names (unicode flag set): only the zip program can do that on Linux.

With issue10955.patch (#10972): py2app and py2exe will only support ASCII filenames, but at least it fixes this issue :-)

With issue10955.patch + zipfile_unicode.patch (#10972): py2app will support non-ASCII filenames, but py2exe will only support ASCII filenames.

We can fix the bootstrap issue today, and improve zipfile later to support non-ASCII filenames. Anyway, Python 3.2 doesn't support non-ASCII filenames on Windows (#3080), and I plan to fix this in Python 3.3.