Switching to UTF-8 and Gnome 1.2.x

Hi,

In my transition to UTF-8, I found that Gnome 1.2.x has a lot of files
in mixed encodings. All *.desktop files and .directory files are in
mixed encodings. Entries for [ja] are in EUC-JP, entries for [de] are
in ISO-8859-1/15 and entries for [ru] are in KOI8-R and so on. On the
other hand, corresponding KDE files are all in UTF-8 so that I don't
need to change anything there. Anyway, thanks to Encoding module (to be
included in upcoming Perl 5.8 by default), I was able to write a simple
script to add ko_KR.UTF-8 entries for all [ko] entries in EUC-KR
in *desktop files and .directory files. Below is the list of
directories I have to run my script on:

/usr/share/apps
/usr/share/applets
/usr/share/applnk
/etc/X11/applnk
/usr/share/mc
$HOME/.gnome

Still, I got gibberish in Gnome tip of the day. It turned out that gnome
hint files (usually installed in /usr/share/gnome/hints) are Xml files
in mixed encodings. I don't think they're compliant to Xml standard
because I've never heard of Xml files in mixed encodings. So, I also
had to add ko_KR.UTF-8 entries for all [ko] entries. Even with this,
for some reason unknown to me, whenever I cross the 'boundary'(i.e.
from the last to the first or the other way around), I got gibberish.

Two other  places where languages are tied to encodings are
Gnome help (usually in /usr/share/gnome/help) and Gimp tips
(/usr/(local/)share/gimp/$version/tips/gimp_tips.[lang].txt) I also had
to make UTF-8 version of them.

I believe all these problems have been addressed in Gnome 2.0(RC?/beta),
but still Gnome 1.x are widely used. I thought my experience would
help others who want to move on to UTF-8 as well as distribution
builders.

  Jungshik Shin