Perhaps «export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8», if your platform has that encoding?
Yes, thanks, that is one of the workarounds. But that's not my question. My question is, why can't svn just treat the filenames as bytes? I remain baffled by the need to unconditionally convert to/from UTF-8 (or any other encoding). Nothing in my environment ("C" in all respects) says to do this, as far as I know. We (this is the TeX Live svn repository, by the way) also have the other problems mentioned so far, case clashes and Windows special characters also causing trouble. But those seem different in kind to me. Those problems are induced by the operating system and/or filesystem, and I don't expect svn to solve them for me. In contrast, the > svn: E000022: Can't convert string from 'UTF-8' to native encoding: error seems to be induced purely by svn on its own. I expect there is a good reason for the behavior, since svn behavior is usually sensible. I just can't imagine what that reason is. And I wish there was a way to override it. Just give me the bytes, dear svn! Thanks, Karl