Just saw a bug with the git backend and utf8. I was committing to ikiwiki and the post-commit hook emitted a warning message about some text from git not being encoded as proper utf-8. I've lost the message, but it was from line 36 of git.pm. After a couple other commits, the message stopped appearing.

Probably git's output needs to be force encoded to utf-8. --Joey

I did that in 4ac0b2953131d7a53562ab8918c8e5a49952d8ac , done --Joey