[TYPO3-core] The installer, the charset and the DB

[Michael Stucki]

Hi Dmitry,

> Michael Stucki wrote:
> > Make UTF-8 the default in 4.1 except if compatVersion is set to an older
> > version.
>
> +1. The sooner - the better. But we need to take mysql 3.23 into account
> because it does not support utf-8. Or just drop 3.23 support.

Who is using 3.23 anymore? Maybe we should wait until Debian ends support of 
Woody. I'm not 100% sure but think that all major distributions switched to 
4.x more than two years ago. (MySQL 4.0 was released in March 2003)

> > This requires only a few changes:
> > - Write a short guide on how to convert latin1 (or whatever) DBs to UTF-8
>
> This would be great because conversion is difficult to do :( I tried and
> not succeeded - 1 or 2 characters were converted improperly (appeared as
> question marks).

How did you convert your DB? According to Peter this works pretty easy using 
"mysqldump" and "mysql --charset utf8".

I never tried that so far since I've converted the databases using a little 
extension which I've written. However it is not yet complete since it still 
requires some manual modifications...

> > - Remove multiplyDBfieldSize
>
> Do I understand right: it is not needed for mysql 4.x at all?

It is not needed if MySQL uses UTF-8. However it is still possible that 4.x 
could be running with ISO-8859-1, and in this case multiplyDBfieldSize is 
still useful. ( => not sure! am I right about this?)

Btw. as I've mentioned earlier already, the option breaks some stuff for 
example the creation of the sys_refindex table during install! The reason for 
this is that TYPO3 changes a varchar field into a text, which however can't 
be part of the key anymore (which is the case for sys_refindex).

I think I'm going to write a quick workaround to fix the situation in 4.0.1 
only for this table at least. It's pretty bad if it's missing...

> > - Add a big fat warning if the database doesn't run with UTF-8 support
>
> But to let user switch it off. I still see compatibility warning each
> time when I login to BE and *I HATE IT!*

Any idea how to solve that?

- michael
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