Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:
Just this point, as I do not have time to deal with this topic right
now.
The concern about Japanese ISO encodings colliding with control bytes is
theoretical at best: sideband messages are prefixed with the ASCII string
"remote: ", so any such encoding would already be broken today.
This is false.
ISO/IEC 2022 is designed to allow mixing different encodings
(including ASCII), and it is a common practice to mix in a Japanese
string (or any of your choice) enclosed in a pair of "ESC $ B"
(note: 'B' is for Japanese, but other character encoding can be
specified in the same string by using a different letter here) and
"ESC ( B" to go back to ASCII. So if you throw "remote: " at the
beginning, that comes out in ASCII. The payload may have ISO/IEC
2022 encoded "foreign" letters, but again, they are closed with "ESC
( B" to switch back to ASCII, if you add random junk (like "..."
perhaps) after them in ASCII, your random junk will come out in
ASCII just fine.