Before Bugs Everywhere Directory v1.4 we kept
  "encoding"
  "vcs_name"
and other bugdir-wide configuration options in ./be/settings

Now we don't store them anymore, but we should keep some.  For
example, the encoding setting is useful when running `be html` in a
cron job.  The settings are repository wide, so they should _still_ go
in ./be/settings (since there may, eventually, be several bugdirs in a
repo), but who's job is it to read that file?

The user interface takes care of encoding, but the storage object 
would be checking for a bug repository and reading the settings file.
How/when does it notify the UI?