handling of different encodings

Hi,

Currently texi2html handle rightly only the documents
encoded in the current locale. Instead the
@documentencoding value should be used. I read the
perl documentation, and I think this could be rather
easy to achieve. However it requires a perl version
above 5.8 (with the Encode module).

I think that abandonating compatibility with older
perl isn't right. However I don't know how to have a
code conditionnal on the perl version (in C I would
have used #ifdef or #if). The possibility I see would
be to require a file at execution time if the perl
version is high enough. In this file Encode would be
used. And the functions in that file would be used if
the perl version is high enough.

I would really prefer something happening at compile
time, and no new file to require.
 
Any thoughts ?
 
Pat