While most of the world has switched to UTF-8, there are still some places where ISO-8859 is used. It would be nice if fossil kept the repository in UTF-8, but recoded on the fly to keep the local copy in the system encoding.

Please see ticket

Encodings are mostly about display.  Fossil stores octets.  If all of your systems are set up to use Latin-1, then except in <i>very</i> rare <i>real</i> instances you'll get Latin-1 when you look at the repository (see below.)

You will <u>always</u> get back the octets you commit to the repository as source files.

The only time the encoding actually matters is when the encoding is interacting with the repository itself.  This kind of meta-circular stuff causes problems in any system.  The canonical example in Fossil is multi-byte characters in a wikipage title, which display as "entified" UTF-8.