UTF-8 vs. ISO-8859-1

[Niki Kovacs]

Hi,

I'm an Austrian writer living in Montpezat (South France), recently
converted to Ubuntu. I've been using Slackware and Debian before (100%
GNU/Linux since 2001). I got Ubuntu installed and configured in no time
on our little home LAN (1 "server", 3 desktop). However, a few questions
remain. One dragon at a time, as they say.

I'm confused about the locales, the charset setting. I first set the
default locale (which I'm asked for during the install) to fr_FR.UTF-8.
Then I had some problems with Evolution not showing french accents and
making a general mess of my mail backup.

So I decided to switch back to iso-8859-1 (used in western europe).
Everything displayed OK... until I installed dvdrip... argh. 

Now I wonder what the best solution would be. Maybe configure
fr_FR.UTF-8 as the main locale, and then try to set Evolution to display
everything as default iso-8859-1? But even if I deactivate the utf-8
setting, dpkg-reconfigure automatically includes it back for me. 

I've read the (amusing, though) article on joelonsoftware.com.
Instructing... and even more confusing.

Question: is there a reliable statement / doc somewhere on what seems to
be a babylonian mess?

Cheers,

Niki Kovacs