That view is unfair to the people who have done lots of work, himi in particular. `Working on Unicode support' in my book isn't restricted to implementing an apparently-unnecessary, disruptive, incompatible change to the internal encoding, even if it's what one wants ideally.
I think that supporting Unicode at the internal level is the best way to support it fully, and that's what we have decided to do. As a result of that decision, we are sometimes reluctant to put time into studying, installing and maintaining other approaches which would be obsolete once we do it the right way. Supporting Unicode superficially while retaining the current internal representation raises a number of problems, one of them being that the internal representation has several alternatives for the same character which correspond to the same code point in Unicode. - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/