i18n, alternative solution

Hi and Happy New Year

Things are happening wrt to support for working with multiple locales, which is nice to see. I've not had time to follow the development so these comments (and code) may be considered somewhat late in the process.

What disturbes me is the complexity that the approach of storing multiple encodings in the same repository results in. I was hacking another solution earlier this autumn, that takes another approach, i.e. UTF-8 is the internal encoding. period. If you want to working with anything else, you convert on input and output. The code is very simply since it has few cases to consider and I don' t need to store encoding anywhere. What is missing is a flags to disable i18n for a flag (or enable it).

The uglyness is the filename parts since I catch all filename operations and not only the ones I need. The target wasn't final code, but to prove that it could be done.

The focus is on file names, but commit messages were included since it was so simple. You can get the code at http://rosenberg.homelinux.net/repos/GIT.git on the branch i18n. I modded the testcases to verify that GIT works after the patches, but one would probably prefer to write new test cases for UTF-8.

5d73e28397f7ec0f85fcb8e31e91326afbcfea19 is the last commit that executes all test cases successfully.

I could send the code as patches if you like, not on top of the lastest version though, but 1.4.2-something,

-- robin