Hello,

the file _darcs/prefs/author is written in the local encoding, not
UTF-8. Therefore, it isn’t portable. Changing the character set or
copying a repo to a another machine that uses a different character set
will produce wrong author names.

Best wishes,
Wolfgang

This looks really easy to fix.

I'm assuming it's fair to mandate UTF-8 in all darcs config files; 
please shout if not.

Person submitting the patch:
- bonus points for documentation update
- more bonus points for having a nose around in our other config file 
readers, eg. the hooks, defaults, etc

FTR, this is still true on 2.12.4

Issue is still pending. We use the locale encoding because I thought 
that is the most natural thing to do for files that are edited/viewed 
by the human users. Nowadays UTF-8 is a very common encoding for text 
files across various operating systems so we might want to review that 
decision.