[PATCH 0/5] iconv: module for MODIFIED-UTF-7

[Max Gautier]

On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 05:01:14PM -0300, Adhemerval Zanella wrote:
> The only worry I have if this encoding is really used in the wild that
> justify its inclusion on glibc.  The fact that it is defined for about 
> 17 years without anyone having the trouble to register it on IANA makes
> me doubtful it is really that useful.

AFAIK, it's only used for IMAP client and servers. Searching Google for
"IMAP4 utf-7 usage" shows there exists some implementations already
(PHP, Python, Perl (I think)) and several questions on Stack Overflow
(over the years and until recently) on how to deal with that UTF-7.
So it seems it's a narrow use case, but used by many. Since I suppose
that many languages can interface with glibc, including that modified
UTF-7 would avoid workarounds like converting to original UTF-7 then
just replacing the shift character and '/' by ',', and that kind of
things.