Rationale:

The proposed resoluion says that conversions can be performed one internal character at a time. This rules out some encodings that would otherwise be legal. The alternative answer would mean there would be some internal positions that do not correspond to any external file position.

An example of an encoding that this rules out is one where the internT and externT are of the same type, and where the internal sequence c1 c2 corresponds to the external sequence c2 c1.

It was generally agreed that basic_filebuf relies on this property: it was designed under the assumption that the external-to-internal mapping is N-to-1, and it is not clear that basic_filebuf is implementable without that restriction.

The proposed resolution is expressed as a restriction on codecvt when used by basic_filebuf, rather than a blanket restriction on all codecvt facets, because basic_filebuf is the only other part of the library that uses codecvt. If a user wants to define a codecvt facet that implements a more general N-to-M mapping, there is no reason to prohibit it, so long as the user does not expect basic_filebuf to be able to use it.