fix regression chowning chef provisioning directory

if the provisioning directory is mounted before this method is called, and the mounted filesystem is of a type that doesn't support chown (e.g. vmhgfs for vmware or hfs) then this method will fail.
Merge pull request #1982 from michaelglass/patch-1

fix regression chowning chef provisioning directory
Set default internal encoding to UTF-8 [GH-1977]
Update CHANGELOG