deploying UTF-8 in new programs

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

Some Unicode-related questions (maybe I should be asking these on the 
gnome 2.0 list or the gnome i18n list):

    1) How did the po files for projects like gtk+ get transcoded to UTF-8?
 Who did it? With what tools?
    2) Is there a standard way to detect at runtime that the gettext 
translations are in the wrong charset? Should we bother doing that?
    3) How should programs figure out what character set file names are in?
 Should we add something to glib and/or gnome-vfs to help with this?
    4) Are there functions in the platform for converting file names and 
paths and the like to and from UTF-8?
    5) When making file: URIs, should the % sequences encode the actual 
file names, or the UTF-8 equivalent of the file names, taking into account 
the character set used for file names?

I realized that I'll need to deal with these issues soon as I try to port 
Nautilus, so I figured I better ask now.

    -- Darin