+
+>>>>> Ikiwiki wrappers only allow whitelisted environment variables
+>>>>> through, and the locale environment variables are not included
+>>>>> currently.
+>>>>>
+>>>>> But that's not the whole story, because "machine's default locale"
+>>>>> is not very well defined. For example, my laptop is a Debian system.
+>>>>> It has a locale setting in /etc/environment (`LANG="en_US.UTF-8"`).
+>>>>> But even if I start apache, making sure that LANG is set and exported
+>>>>> in the environment, CGI scripts apache runs do not see LANG in their
+>>>>> environment. (I notice that `/etc/init.d/apache` explocitly
+>>>>> forces LANG=C. But CGI scripts don't see the C value either.)
+>>>>> Apache simply does not propigate its runtime environment to CGI
+>>>>> scripts, and this is probably to comply with the CGI specification
+>>>>> (although it doesn't seem to completly rule out CGI's being passed
+>>>>> other variables).
+>>>>>
+>>>>> If mercurial needs a utf-8 locale, I guess the mercurial plugin needs
+>>>>> to check if it's not in one, and do something sane (either fail
+>>>>> earlier, or complain, or strip utf-8 out of comments). --[[Joey]]