Из переписки с Jamie:

> $ /usr/libexec/xscreensaver/phosphor -scale 1 -ticks 2 -font "-*-terminus-bold-*-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-*-cp1251" -program "LANG=ru_RU.cp1251 date"
больше не показывает кириллицу

> I added across-the-board support for Unicode to xscreensaver in 5.31, which means that some hacks (apple2, phosphor, xmatrix, gltext) needed to downcode UTF-8 to ASCII. 

> The built-in font -- 6x10font.png -- only contains 8 bit Latin1 characters. When Phosphor encounters UTF-8 / Unicode characters out of that range, it does its best to downcode them, but obviously that's not going to work very well.

>> 3. you don't have any plans on fixing this regression bug. right?
> My apologies but that is correct. You know XScreenSaver is my hobby, right? :-(
> I do gleefully accept patches!

Понимаю, что это сильно сложнее, чем ошибка упаковки. Но фиксирую здесь для доступности пользователей Сети