bzr-email fails if committer has non-ascii gecos

[Glenn Morris]

Glenn Morris wrote:

> Maybe I can just add
>
> $ENV{'LANG'} = 'en_US.UTF-8'
>
> to the wrapper script that spawns the bzr process when a user accesses
> the system via bzr+ssh?

No, that didn't work:

bzr: warning: unsupported locale setting
  bzr could not set the application locale.
  Although this should be no problem for bzr itself, it might
  cause problems with some plugins. To investigate the issue,
  look at the output of the locale(1p) tool.

It seems the server does not have the `locales' package installed.
I suppose I can add it, but is there no other way to force bzr to assume
utf-8? I'm wary of accidentally breaking something else.