I was not impressed when I tried to check out a UTF-8 encoded file with SVK, then got the helpful message Can't encode path as ascii:
$ svk up
Syncing //drp/trunk(/drp/trunk) in /home/wolever/Trunk to 5388.
Can't encode path as ascii.
I was even less impressed when I searched Google for svk unicode and this blog was the first hit.
Fortunately my Google-foo is high today, and I was able to find a page that gives a solution: Making sure that your locale is set to something similar to en_US.UTF-8.
On Debian, here's how I do it:
$ sudo apt-get install locales # Ubuntu 6.06 didn't have it...
...
$ export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
$ export LANGUAGE="$LANG"
And, of course, it may be good to put those two exports in ~/.bashrc.
Oh, but wait!
$ svk up
Syncing //drp/trunk(/drp/trunk) in /home/wolever/Trunk to 5388.
Can't encode path as ascii.
It still doesn't work!
It turns out that, for what ever reason, something was upset. Eventually I got it working by deleting the offending directory, then using svk revert to revert it:
$ rm -r hacking/
$ svk revert -R hacking
...
Reverted hacking/utf8_爱的
Hurra!