> I don't know what you mean by dropping, since OS X by construction needs
> a filesystem encoding (utf-8) different from the locale encoding;

See above. I propose to stop using the locale encoding for command line
arguments and environment variables on OSX, and use UTF-8 instead.

> and
> Windows hardwires the decoding/encoding of bytes filenames using mbcs
> regardless of the current codepage, IIRC.

I wish byte-oriented file names could be dropped on Windows. But that
is probably too incompatible.

> So do you just mean the filesystem encoding should be hidden from the
> user? What would be the benefit?

That the very issue that this bug report (re-read the title) is about
would go away.