[i18n] Correct charset/locale settings?

[Joonas Hämäläinen]

Hips,

I was asking similar question in horde mailing list yesterday, but was 
directed to search i18n list. I didn't find answers via search, so I'll 
rephrase my question a bit and ask again. :)

I have multinational horde installation, running old horde version. I am 
  in need to update it into current version, and of course keep old data 
for users.

So, very hard bottom question is what character settings I should use in 
horde? It seems to default in utf8, but if I take old db and upgrade it 
for new version, there are entries which doesn't look correct.

Old system has latin1_swedish_ci collation. Server itself has 
en_US.UTF-8 locale. That old horde doesn't have such charset setting.

So should I just take old data, keep it latin1, set horde charset to 
latin1 and be happy that things work again? Is there something what 
might break?

Or is it better to get database in utf8, and then have horde charset 
also in utf8?

If I do this utf8 conversion, some parts seems to be right, but then 
there are places where it is wrong. If I change horde charset into 
latin1, they appear correct. I'm a bit confused about this behaviour.

What worries me most is that it is multinational system, and there are 
plenty of different users. Russians, Finnish, europeans, some Asians, 
they all use it daily, both in English and in their native language, 
using their native characters. What kind of settings I need to use to 
make sure they all have their data working best way?

This is quite long list of questions, and I have tried searching for 
solution quite a while. If reply to me is search more, please provide me 
some keywords to use. I might have tried with wrong search terms. 
Hardest part is always ask right questions ;) Also, if there is some 
documentation describing relations of different charsets/locales in 
different components of system (system locale, mysql collation, horde 
setting, browser input, etc), I would like to hear of such.

-Joonas Hämäläinen