pycompat: use os.fsencode() to re-encode sys.argv Historically, the previous code made sense, as Py_EncodeLocale() and fs.fsencode() could possibly use different encodings. However, this is not the case anymore for Python 3.2, which uses the locale encoding as the filesystem encoding (this is not true for later Python versions, but see below). See https://vstinner.github.io/painful-history-python-filesystem-encoding.html for a source and more background information. Using os.fsencode() is safer, as the documentation for sys.argv says that it can be used to get the original bytes. When doing further changes, the Python developers will take care that this continues to work. One concrete case where os.fsencode() is more correct is when enabling Python's UTF-8 mode. Py_DecodeLocale() will use UTF-8 in this case. Our previous code would have encoded it using the locale encoding (which might be different), whereas os.fsencode() will encode it with UTF-8. Since we don’t claim to support the UTF-8 mode, this is not really a bug and the patch can go to the default branch. It might be a good idea to not commit this to the stable branch, as it could in theory introduce regressions.