So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[Akira13]

Do you realize your example is invalid because it uses Lazarus? Lazarus includes tons of hacks and custom RTL patching to make UTF-8 work on Windows as if it was default.
I write in pure FPC. The FPC RTL doesn't have the Lazarus hacks. If I try accessing TFileStream.Create('c:\Users\／人◕‿‿◕人＼\Application Data\chentrah\chentrah.ini', fmOpenRead); it will fail even with the file in place.
Fpc 3.x does have much better support for Unicode paths and only requires minor patching. sadly, it is not ready yet.

Uh, what are you talking about?

program Test;

uses
  SysUtils;

var
  AFileNameConsistingEntirelyOfUnicodeCharacters: AnsiString;
begin
  AFileNameConsistingEntirelyOfUnicodeCharacters := '௵௵௵௵實實實電電電電參參參ݠݠݼݼݼݼݼਈਈਈ.txt';
  if FileExists('C:\Test\' + AFileNameConsistingEntirelyOfUnicodeCharacters) = True then
    WriteLn('It exists!');
end.

There's the command line version of my example, which I just compiled and ran without issues using the FPC binary directly. I'm also unsure as to how you think Lazarus could "hack" or "patch" the RTL at compile time, considering that you cannot build it without an entirely pre-built FPC to link against.

I do indeed. The Debian maintainers are much more thorough in their approach to stability and they deem fpc 3.x not ready. I agree with them.

lol. I think the vastly more realistic scenario is "the people who maintain Debian are Linux power-users who don't remotely care about anything to do with Pascal and may even look down on the language as something for simpletons, and have just forgotten to update it for a really long time." I'd imagine the only reason it was ever added as a standard Debian package in the first place was because like one specific guy who just happened to use it on Linux and was also a Debian maintainer took the time to do it himself.

FPC/Lazurus is far more stable than most of what's out there. I've used nothing but the trunk of both of them for several years and have almost never experienced a situation where one of them conflicted with the other. And any time there was an issue it was either something I could easily work around myself, or it was just fixed in the actual codebase within a day or so.