Alphabet of kernel source

[Pete Zaitcev <zaitcev@redhat.com>]

Guys,

I have a silly question, for which I am unable to google out the answer
so far. Do we have a Linus' decree on the charset and encoding of the
kernel source?

I had a funny situation recently... I prefer non-MIME attachements
for two reasons: a) I grab parts of the header and fold them into
patch and b) it is easier to quote fragments of the patch with clients
I tried (mutt and sylpheed). Admittendly, a different MUA software may
change these habits, but please bear with me here. So, someone sent
me a patch which included a context line with MODULE_AUTHOR() with
an accented name, which the author entered in ISO-8859-1 (he was German).
I replied, but my mail agent recoded the reply as UTF-8. The author
agreed to my patch, and copied my reply, sent to me. Everything was
perfectly readable at this point, but the patch rejected. Because
I use Russian and Japanese simultaneously, all utilities run with UTF-8
my boxes, so it took me a moment to do "LANG=C vi" and find the problem.

Anyhow, long story short, this got me thinking... What is the charset
and the encoding of the actual source? I saw quite a discussion about
the filenames, but this is different. I am sorry if this was discussed
previously.

-- Pete