default character set should be set to utf8

[Sebastian Bertho]

At least since version 4.1 MySQL supports character sets and encodings in the right way, i.e. the client can tell the server which character set he uses (CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT) and the server will do the conversion betwees his internal character set of the table and the client character set.

As Ubuntu uses utf8 as default - and MySQL uses latin1 as default, the current situation leads to the problem that the mysql command line utility as well as mysqldump connect to the server with charset latin1. So this leads to wrong character set conversions (i.e. no character set conversions are done, although they should have been done)

In my opinion the solution is to add default-character-set=utf8 to the [mysqldump] and [mysql] sections in /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

BUT: I think a lot of people have arranged with the old (and in my optionion - wrong - )conversion behaviour - so such a change should be considered careful...

(Checked on last Ubuntu Dapper Flight 6)

[Alan Tam (at)]

Now after one year, I can confirm that this problem still exists in feisty. I have to force every database I create to use default character set utf-8. I just don't understand why this cannot be set as the default of the server in /etc/mysql/my.cnf .

[Johan Ramm-Ericson (johanre)]

I would also like to see this bug addressed. I have had similar problems as those Alan Tam has reported. On a hunch I checked the corresponding Debian packages and the same behaviour is exhibited there, so I reported it as a bug (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=438970). Maybe a change in the Debian package can attract attention from the Ubuntu package maintainers. Of course; if this is a question of limited resources I'll be happy to help out resolving this if I can.