I can't say I like C APIs here.

Would

path_ = stringFormat({:s}, wstr);

work here?

edit: nope.

I'd rather revert this PR to be honest and let it percolate a bit more.

I don't think all _WIN32 should use this code path, things work just fine w/ UCRT builds and UTF-8 code page on "modern" Windows.

Any restoration of the -W API (I personally wouldn't bother) should be done with greater care.

Right.

OTOH, actual users of the library are being impacted. It doesn't seem to be practical to force people to move to UCRT.

It doesn't seem to be practical to force people to move to UCRT.

UCRT is available for 97% of Windows users, it is the default target for Visual Studio since version 2017 I think, and is available for GNU and LLVM toolchains since cca 2019.

It's been almost 2 years since this happened (not saying it should've when it did, it was perhaps a bit premature). But today: Windows 7 EOL'd 5 years ago, Windows 8.1 2 years ago. I really think it's not worth putting the milk back into the bottle. If some passionate legacy users still really need it, it should be done very carefully.

I don't think it's practical to tell users to use toolchain Y to compile exiv2, when toolchain X works perfectly fine for everything else.

If I look on Fedora for example, the UCRT MinGW toolchain is there but lacks many packages. It's even worse on Ubuntu 24.04, effectively telling users MSVCRT and UCRT are no go for their applications.

It's even worse on Ubuntu 24.04

Ubuntu does lag behind unfortunately. It is however now available in 24.10 (and Debian Trixie). Admittedly bare bones as Fedora so less convenient, but not a showstopper... Just out of interest, how many users do you know cross-compiling?

works perfectly fine

And let's not forget the legacy approach was not ideal either: the wmain input argument conversion wrapper is a security hole, and there is a non-trivial -W API code overhead to maintain.

From the issue in Issues, at least digikam.

wmain is only for the exiv2 binary, no? The main issue here is with the library.