I still got Unicode errors. Can't smart just remove the strange characters and
retry the operation? It will miss a character but not the operation.

smart 0.50 from suse guru package

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/smart/interfaces/gtk/interactive.py",
line 180, in callback
    exec code in globals

  File "<callback>", line 1, in <module>

  File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/smart/interfaces/gtk/interactive.py",
line 424, in applyChanges
    if self._ctrl.commitTransaction(transaction, confirm=confirm):

  File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/smart/control.py", line 502, in
commitTransaction
    return self.commitChangeSet(trans.getChangeSet(), caching, confirm)

  File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/smart/control.py", line 560, in
commitChangeSet
    pmclass().commit(pmcs, pkgpaths)

  File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/smart/backends/rpm/pm.py", line 270,
in commit
    probs = ts.run(cb, None)

  File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/smart/backends/rpm/pm.py", line 338,
in __call__
    self._process_rpmout()

  File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/site-packages/smart/backends/rpm/pm.py", line 323,
in _process_rpmout
    output = self.rpmout.read()

  File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/codecs.py", line 418, in read
    newchars, decodedbytes = self.decode(data, self.errors)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe1 in position 18: ordinal
not in range(128)