[Koha] [Koha-devel] Character sets in MariaDB 10.5

[Tomas Cohen Arazi]

Those are just defaults in the OS distribution, that can be changed at will.

Koha, internally, sets the character set correctly on connection time [1].

You should always check when they drop support for our used encodings.
Which is not the case (for now?). We have the test suite run against the
latest versions of MariaDB for that purpose.

I recommend you set that defaults correctly so they are picked when you use
the CLI.

Best regards

[1]
https://git.koha-community.org/Koha-community/Koha/src/branch/master/Koha/Database.pm#L74

El mié., 25 ago. 2021 17:54, Michael Kuhn <mik at adminkuhn.ch> escribió:

> Hi
>
> 1. In the last few years when installing Koha on Debian GNU/Linux 9 or
> 10 the character sets in MariaDB were as follows:
>
> MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%';
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> | Variable_name            | Value                      |
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> | character_set_client     | utf8mb4                    |
> | character_set_connection | utf8mb4                    |
> | character_set_database   | utf8mb4                    |
> | character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
> | character_set_results    | utf8mb4                    |
> | character_set_server     | utf8mb4                    |
> | character_set_system     | utf8                       |
> | character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
>
> Today I installed Koha 21.05.03 on Debian GNU/Linux 11 with MariaDB
> 10.5.11 where the character sets are as follows:
>
> MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%';
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> | Variable_name            | Value                      |
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> | character_set_client     | utf8                       |
> | character_set_connection | utf8                       |
> | character_set_database   | utf8mb4                    |
> | character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
> | character_set_results    | utf8                       |
> | character_set_server     | utf8mb4                    |
> | character_set_system     | utf8                       |
> | character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
>
> I'm not sure what is going on here. Does anyone know why the character
> sets for client, connection and results have changed from utf8mb4 to
> utf8? Is this correct with Koha or should these character sets be changed?
>
> 2. Today I came upon an installation of Koha 18.11.05 using MariaDB
> 10.0.32 which has the following character sets:
>
> MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%';
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> | Variable_name            | Value                      |
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
> | character_set_client     | utf8                       |
> | character_set_connection | utf8                       |
> | character_set_database   | latin1                     |
> | character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
> | character_set_results    | utf8                       |
> | character_set_server     | latin1                     |
> | character_set_system     | utf8                       |
> | character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
> +--------------------------+----------------------------+
>
> This seems quite wrong to me - as far as I know "latin1" was never a
> supported character set in Koha... as far as I know the character sets
> should be set as shown in topic 1.
>
> However, is it still possible to update such a database with these
> character sets to Koha 21.05.03 without destroying the data completely?
>
> Best wishes: Michael
> --
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