Andreas,
Playing around a little it appears as if the Unix VM always converts path names with the assumption that Squeak uses MacRoman in the image and only -pathenc affects the translation between file system and the image (i.e., -textenc has *no* effect on path name translation whatsoever). Can someone confirm this? It would explain why -pathenc MacRoman works (since like you say it's really the "no conversion" flag) if combined with a proper file name converter in the image.
I think it is. If I remember correctly, this was introduced before 3.8 (around 3.7 era, I believe) by Ned, and that was only to make something he was trying to do work.
Well, nobody tried to change stuff on the all platforms at once. Windows is doing ok with 3.10 VM and OLPC Etoys image (there is still code that deals with older VM... typical installation for people is to install stuff from squeakland.org and then use Etoys image).
What encoding options are being used on OLPC? Do non-ascii file names, clipboard, drag and drop etc. work on OLPC?
Filenames are in UTF-8. Clipboard and Drag and drop uses somewhat strange mechanism, but they are normalized to UTF-8 as well.
-- Yoshiki