behaviour change in getDirectoryContents in GHC 7.2?

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