On Linux, wchar_t values are mapped to their UTF-8 counterparts; however, that does not have to be the case as the standard allows any arbitrary representation to be used, and this is the case for Solaris.

In Oracle Solaris, the internal form of wchar_t is specific to a locale; in the Unicode locales, wchar_t has the UTF-32 Unicode encoding form, and other locales have different representations [1].

This is an issue because Python expects wchar_t to correspond with Unicode, which on Oracle Solaris with non-UTF locale results either in errors (values are outside the Unicode range) or in output with different symbols.

Unicode locales work as expected, but they are not an acceptable workaround for some Oracle Solaris users that cannot use Unicode encoding for various reasons.


Because of that, we fixed it a few months ago with a patch to `PyUnicode_FromWideChar`, which handles conversion to unicode (attached in PR). It was tested over the last half a year, and we didn't see any related issues since.

Is something like this acceptable or should it be fixed on a different place/in a different way? All comments are appreciated.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E39536/gmwkm.html