[horde] locales/charsets and backends

[Jan Schneider]

The ones who follow the cvs commits closely have noticed that I already
added some "charset" parameters to several sql backend definitions.
The purpose should be pretty clear, it defines the internal charset that's
used by the database. Where I added this parameter we now convert between
the internal and the ui charset when saving or retrieving data from/to the
database.

That was pretty easy, but it becomes a lot more complicated on some other
backends. LDAP is easy too, but what about other authentication backends for
example? Let's say usernames, passwords on imap/ftp/pop3 servers? The sork
modules are affected at most by this but potentially also every Auth driver
or even IMP where we might manipulate user names.

Any input how to handle this is welcome. Are there any other backends than
sql and ldap (not even sure about this one) who support different (even
multibyte) charsets other than ascii and iso-8859-1? Should we always add a
charset parameter to a configuration when we deal with external data? Are
there backends where we can assume a fixed charset?

I send this to the horde list because I hope for feedback especially from
folks who deal on a daily basis with "non-standard" charsets, even multibyte
charsets. All developers live in iso-8859-1 encoded parts of the world :-)
so we depend on other people's experiences.

Jan.

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