Well I have the problem in the configuration page for Hudson when I tried to set
the Welcome Message
I have the same issue with the job configuration form (in the description field
for example).
If you have trace to activate so that I can check where all goes wrong.
As for the header I didn't see any META tag (like <META
HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">) in the HTML
header (not the HTTP response header which is correctly set).
I'll get the source bundle for 1.81 and maybe add a trace or two ;o). What is
most surprising is that I am full UTF-8, from my client OS to my server or my scm

You still haven't given me the exact steps to reproduce, but I guess that's

1. go to http://localhost/hudson/job/myjob/configure
2. type 'é' in the job description
3. press submit
4. see http://localhost/hudson/job/myjob/ and confirm that
the displayed description is wrong

But I've already done this, and it works for me. And my experience suggests this
is usually a container configuration issue, if you are using a reasonably modern
browser. Tomcat for example is known to be broken in this area, as described in
the document.

There shouldn't be any <META> tag, since Hudson instructs the web container to
send proper HTTP header. If you are using Firefox, you can confirm that by
looking at "view page info" from the context menu.

The line you want to look at is core/src/main/java/hudson/model/Job.java line
451 where it does:

> description = req.getParameter("description");

I suspect the req.getParameter("description") method is returning a wrong value,
and if so, it is because the container uses a wrong encoding to interpret the
request. If you can check this, that would be great.

I also recommend double-check Tomcat's connector setting.

I do agree that the right http headers are sent and I am positive that
Firefox use UTF-8 as the display encoding.
For the steps you are right and it happens on the Hudson System Configuration
Page when for example I set a welcome message.
For the Tomcat conf I added the URIEncoding into the connector element but this
changed nothing.
I should have some time to further my investigations today so I hope to have a
clear answer.

Ok, my mistake this was a Tomcat problem but a subtler one than you might think.
Someone had put the RequestDumperValve on the server and this is what is
breaking the UTF-8. Changing the URIEncoding has no effect on this
Sorry for the disturbance.
All is working fine now :o)

Added note to http://hudson.dev.java.net/i18n.html. Marking as fixed.