wide characters and i18n

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%googlemail.com@localhost>]

Hi, I'm trying to understand how to write portable C code that supports
international character sets. As I understand so far, it has a lot to
do with C library and current locale setting.

1. What is the recommended way for user level applications to deal with
different character encodings? Treat all external character data as
multi-byte and use C library wchar_t and wide stdio functions to
convert multi-byte to wchart_t for internal character processing?

2. How extensive is NetBSD's support for i18n and wide characters? Are
there any missing bits or things I need to look out for?

3. Any functions that are not thread-safe that I need to look out for?