behaviour change in getDirectoryContents in GHC 7.2?

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

Hi,

I'm just investigating what we can do about a problem with darcs'
handling of non-ASCII filenames on GHC 7.2.

The issue is apparently that as of GHC 7.2, getDirectoryContents now
tries to decode filenames in the current locale, rather than converting
a stream of bytes into characters: http://bugs.darcs.net/issue2095

I found an old thread on the subject:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-June/062795.html and
some GHC tickets (e.g. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3300)

Can anyone point me at the rationale and details of the change and/or
suggest workarounds?

Cheers,

Ganesh