M-x shell has been my friend for decades, and I've always been comfortable even sympathetic with his insistence on being a dumb terminal (i.e. TERM=dumb). But recently I've found my self setting LC_ALL by hand so that python won't default to ASCII on its standard streams. I vaguely recall having similar problems at other times with ruby and perl.
So, my question: What is a good approach to setting things up so I don't have to set LC_ALL by hand? For example, should I just slam this in shell-mode-hook?