Bug 125348

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.0)
Installed from:    Gentoo Packages

Please make UTF-8 the default encoding for kio_sftp. This is consistent with http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-12.txt:

  The preferred encoding for filenames is UTF-8. This is
  consistent with IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages
  [RFC2277] and it is further supposed that the server is more
  likely to support any local character set and be able to
  convert it to UTF-8.

The rest of section 6 is also pleading strongly in favour of UTF-8. This is also consistent with other clients' behaviour. For example CyberDuck and WinSCP default to UTF-8. At least that's what I concluded from these two pages:
http://cyberduck.ch/changelog.php
http://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_login_sftp

In order to avoid problems, it's therefore advisable to change kio_sftp's default encoding to UTF-8. (Currently it's Latin 1.)

Finally, it's simply the right thing to do on modern distributions, since for a few years filenames have been stored in UTF-8, and sftp sends them as UTF-8. In this case, Latin 1 is clearly outdated. Out of the box kio_sftp won't even work properly when connecting to localhost. IMHO, that's unacceptable.

Thanks for considering this change.

The IETF draft also specifies an extension mechanism for encoding detection. This could also be considered, even if the changes would be more important. Note however that
  "A server that does not send this extension MUST send all
   filenames encoded in UTF-8."

See bugs #105186 and #125212 for similar issues.