you do NOT need to write all your programs together to make them work together.

> One might argue that the negotiation is implied by the LOCALE setting.
The LOCALE setting is just a way to specify manually the information that can't be negotiated through the pipe. If pipes were actually a text stream, there'd be no need to do with manually and things would just work.

Anyway, I don't think such a design would be desirable, because as I said before, text is in fact not a universal interface. Which is of course why many programs today communicate with much more structured protocols like D-Bus.

While I do sympathise with your views about UTF-8, there's a large amount of data stored in legacy encodings, and it's not going away any time soon.