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. 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,

* [[bugs/unhappy_without_UTF8_locale]]: haskell crashes when told to output 
  a string with characters > 255 in a non-utf8 locale.
* [[bugs/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]]