> I am not 100% convinced that it's really Strawberry's job.

Neither am I that's why I ask/meditate. (Too many dragons in exaggerated DWIM)

But Strawberry wouldn't need to patch perl5db.pl, the debugger has config files and so does Perl itself.

AFAIK did Strawberry and ActivePerl always "localize" the installation to Win.

Anyhow I think it would be best placed in Term::ReadLine and/or the included backends, the debugger is not the only app relying on ReadLine.

The simplest approach would be for ReadLine to check if Win32:: is loaded and to warn if control character area is mis-used. The same way setting "Term=dumb" is recommended.

FWIW I see that ReadLine is capable to return IN / OUT filehandles and I remember it's possible to provide the codepage in the encoding.

So probably (?) it could be possible that ReadLine adjust itself automatically to the current CP.