Further to ticket #632, the need for the [perforce] configuration section could be completely eliminated if the plugin automatically detected whether the Perforce server was running in Unicode mode or not.
This is possible on Perforce 2004.2 or later servers by setting the P4CHARSET to 'none' and running the equivalent of p4 -ztag info and looking for the '... unicode enabled' line and if present then setting the P4CHARSET to 'utf8'.
This would add a little overhead (a few ms) to connecting to the Perforce server. But this could be overcome by still allowing the unicode = 1/0 line and only performing the introspection of the server if this line was not present.
