Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh architecture discussion: format engine character set

[Ken Hornstein]

>That problem space lives well outside of nmh. The people to rightly fix
>it are the xterm authors, and people writing keyboard drivers. These
>conversion layers belong inside the terminal I/O drivers, where they
>can fix the problem for everything.

The people who at least have spoken up on this list in the past have not,
AFAIK, lacked the technical ability to run in an UTF-8 locale; there's
no work on xterm or terminal drivers that is necessary; that's all been
done a long time ago.  They have just chosen not to, e.g.:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2012-01/msg00206.html
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2012-01/msg00203.html

As Earl Hood pointed out: Character encoding choices can get quite political.

I confess that I am surprised the "UTF-8 or die" crowd has been so unaminous
so far.  No one dissents from this view?  Like I said, it simplifies a WHOLE
bunch of code (at the cost of adding a new library dependency), so I would
actually be fine with it.

--Ken