Comment 1 for bug 832028

For common cases like getting an integer or other simple values out of the environment, it should be possible to always do the right thing. Path handling in bzr is generally confused by corner cases, here the main issues are:
* Python 2 doesn't give access to the unicode environment block on windows only the 'ANSI' compatiblity apis.
* Both the environment and paths can be arbitrary bytes on nix so decoding to unicode is never fully correct.