John,
Well the VM is given a info.plist entry or cmd line that defines what encoding to use. This information needs to be gotten from the VM in order to set the proper filenameConverter. My understanding was that the default for the mac carbon vm was MacRoman, but the fileNameConverter used in 3.8? is latin-1. If I choose latin-1 there are characters in the utf-8 character set allowed in os-x that can't be translated to latin-1 so latin-1 technically is not a viable choice. I understand UTF-8 is viable, but somehow the image should configure that from the Vm without manual intervention.
Note that the fileNameConverter to use is decided when the image is started. It can check the platform, vm version, etc., etc. to decide which one to use. An example is shown JapaneseEnvironment class>>systemConverterClass. In the other words, the image stuff can be configured.
-- Yoshiki