Currenty, git-annex forces output, particularly of filenames, in a utf-8 locale.

Note that this does not mean it cannot be used with filenames in other encodings. git-annex is entirely encoding agnostic when it comes to manipulating filenames. It just displays their names always converted to utf-8, which may not look right when you have a non-utf8 locale.

This had to be done to work around some bugs with haskell's handling of filename encodings. In particular,

• unhappy without UTF8 locale: haskell crashes when told to output a string with characters > 255 in a non-utf8 locale.
• problems with utf8 names: On many OSs, haskell expects non-decoded raw char8 in FilePaths. In order to display a filename, though, it needs to first be decoded, and git-annex currently assumes it was encoded as utf8.

git-annex's behavior is unlikely to improve much until haskell's support for utf8 filenames improves. --Joey

done -- I just turned off all encoding handling on stdout and stderr, which avoids these problems nicely. Git-annex now displays just what it input, at least on platforms where haskell does not decode unicode in FilePaths. This will later be a problem when it gets localized, but for now works great. --Joey