Re: [Nmh-workers] repl and mime handling

[Ken Hornstein]

>*Please, no!* Conversion from any charset to utf-8 is possible, but
>conversion back, according to user preferences, is not. People
>start to use funny characters like non-breakable space and so on.

Unfortunately, we don't have unlimited development resources.

Here's my reading of the world:

- The general trend (especially in English-speaking countries) is to move
  toward Unicode (specifically, UTF-8).

- People in Eastern Europe aren't crazy about this.

- Conversion to Unicode is relatively simple.  Conversion from Unicode to
  some other character set isn't, depending on the character set (although
  it would seem to me that converting from a non-breaking space to a regular
  space is a no-brainer, but whatever).

- Given the lack of unlimited development resources, I don't really see people
  willing to change all of the internal APIs to include character set
  information.  That means we pretty much have to choose one character set
  for an internal representation inside of nmh.

- If we have to choose one, the only logical choice is Unicode (which in
  practice means UTF-8; maybe UTF-16, but a trip through the format
  code made me think that UTF-8 is probably the only real choice).

--Ken