[Evolution] I18N in Evolution

[Pavel Polischouk <pavelp geocities com>]

Hello Evolutionists,

Recently I tried several preview releases and snapshots of Evolution if 
it is usable to any extent as an I18N-enabled mailer. More specifically, 
I was interested in its support for Russian language in mails and 
calendar events. Good news is that _something_ works. Bad news is that 
most of the things don't work, and in some setups nothing works. To make 
it clear, I'm not interested in L10N (translation of menu items etc) at 
all - I just want to be able to send and receive messages and work with 
calendar using cyrillic alphabet.

What I tested:

  1. The best part I found is Calendar. On my home machine it let me
     create new tasks in Cyrillic alphabet, displayed them properly,
     and sorted correctly. There were some problems though (below). It
     worked in PR0.7, was broken in PR0.8, works again in snapshots
     2001012305 and 2001012709.
  2. Calendar oddness. Everything works on my home machine, but doesn't
     work on my office machine. Both are RedHat 6.1, but the office
     machine has some packages upgraded. Two of those packages are
     relevant to Evolution: XFree86 (is 3.3.5-3 at home and 3.3.6-20 in
     office) and glibc (2.1.2-11 at home and 2.1.3-15 in office).
     Everything else (Helix Gnome packages and Evolution snapshot
     versions) are the same. Sympthoms are:
     
        1. When running on office machine, some characters typed in
           Russian are displayed as latin characters, some as numbers,
           some are ignored.
        2. When running on office machine with DISPLAY set to home
           machine, none of the characters are ignored, but all are
           displayed as underscores. Both X servers have the same
           keyboard configuration (via standard Xkb "ru" layout).
           Mozilla mail works fine on both setups.
           
  3. Mail component just plainly dislikes anything related to cyrillic
     codepages. When I try to read messages in Russian, these are the
     options:
     
        1. If the mail's charset is defined correctly in header (koi8-r
           in most cases), russian characters in message body are
           displayed as underscores or not displayed at all.
        2. Headers with embedded charset sometimes show up properly,
           sometimes are garbage.
        3. If the charset is not defined, the message is displayed
           using accented Latin-1 characters (they are in the same
           places in Latin-1 as russian characters are in Koi8-R), and
           there is no means of forcibly specifying the content
           encoding - this is a common case where the charset is not
           defined correctly in the header.
        4. Again, all of those things happen differently in my home and
           office setups, but this time nothing works on either.
           
  4. Composing new mail - entering russian text produces garbage on the
     screen, and garbage is sent in mail. Both header and body is
     corrupted.
     

Bottom line - Calendar is usable on some setups, with no idea what the 
'correct' setup is - it just happened. Mail is unusable.
Is I18N enabling in the feature list for 1.0?
I'll be glad to test other snapshots if someone is working on this. Or 
is this just my setup that is broken?

Thanks,
Pavel