Tip: Subversion and accentuated characters in commit messages

One of the good things about Subversion is that all his internals (paths, commit messages, etc) are always UTF-8 encoded. I think that was one of the brightest decisions they made.

Yet, for quite some time I was getting errors when I tried to use commit messages with accentuated characters:

subversion/libsvnsubr/utf.c:466: (aprerr=22)

In my case, the problem is that I didn't have a proper LANG environment variable. If run svn ci like this:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8 svn ci

the problem goes away.

Now, having a LANG environment is not something I want just now. I still use software that does not work well with LANG. So my solution was to create a small shell script in my utilities directory like this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Make SVN commits work with accentuated characters
#

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG

exec /usr/local/bin/svn $@

Nirvana!