Stupid question... can the working tree have a different encoding than the repository?

What if my *NIX system thinks the correct encoding is UTF-8, but the repository maintainer has chosen to use ISO-8859-1? Can I set the path encoding within the repository to be ISO-8859-1 but my working tree to UTF-8 and have JGit perform automatic translation between the two?

I think this works magically (*sigh*). In all of our working tree code we use String and File objects to point to the working tree. Java will handle the encoding/decoding to the filesystem itself. So within JGit we just need to encode/decode the String/File to the in-repository encoding. Am I understanding this right?