Encoding of Mercurial meta information

What character set should the characters be drawn from used in the meta 
information of a Mercurial change set (like the -u user name and -m 
message)?  Plain 7-bit ASCII, ISO 8859-1, full Unicode?

I noticed that for example Caolán's name is garbled (with a "?") both in 
the web front end (e.g., 
<http://hg.services.openoffice.org/cws/cmcfixes65/rev/3ee4cb3a17dd>, 
XHTML marked as '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ascii"?>') and the mails 
sent to [email protected] (which are marked as "content-type: 
text/plain; charset=us-ascii").

(By the way, [email protected] is missing from the list of general 
mailing lists at <http://www.openoffice.org/mail_list.html>.)

-Stephan