[mythtv-users] Questions on correcting database encoding under Gentoo while still on 0.21-fixes

[Tom Dexter]

I've been running mythtv under Gentoo all along, and have always had
the default Gentoo mysql configuration where the default connections
etc are utf8.

I'm still on 0.21-fixes but wanted to get this addressed now rather
than when I decide to upgrade to 0.22, so I did so as per the wiki:

http://wiki.mythtv.org/wiki/Fixing_Corrupt_Database_Encoding

I've always had the same backedn and same configuration, so there's no
reason I can think of that I'd have any "Partial" corruption.

After changing the my.cnf and restarting mysql on the backend as per this part:

http://wiki.mythtv.org/wiki/Fixing_Corrupt_Database_Encoding#Changing_the_MySQL_server_configuration

Luckily before doing the restore I connected to the db and checked the
'status' command output.  It was still defaulting the connection etc
to utf8.  Rather than removing the "character-set-server" and
"default-character-set" lines in my.cnf as per the instructions, I
discovered that I needed to expressly change them from utf8 to latin1.
 Once I did that and restarted, everything looked correct.  At that
point I went ahead with the restore from the corrected backup file and
everything seems ok.  Had I not noticed that, I'm assuming future
database writes would have caused a mess of "Partial" corruption.

I think (though I'm not certain) that this may be related to the fact
that Gentoo has a latin1 use flag for mysql (which is described as
"Use LATIN1 encoding instead of UTF8") that is off by default.  I
think this causes it to use utf8 by default if not otherwise specified
in my.cnf.

I also noticed that if I connected to the backend from the frontend
(on which I have a minimal mysql install with client code only) using
the mysql command line, the default client and connection character
sets defaulted to utf8 (however the server character set and db
character sets where properly set to latin1).  To be safe I made the
same change in the my.cnf file on the frontend to ensure that
everything connected with latin1 by default.  Once I did that,
connecting to the backend from the frontend showed latin1 for
everything.  I assumed that not doing this could possibly affect any
database writes made directly to the db from the frontend (if that
actually happens).

I wanted to make sure that there isn't something wrong with anything
I've done there.  I'd think the wiki needs something about this or
someone could make quite a big mess, unless they're doing this as part
of the 0.22 upgrade...as I understand it, none of those connection
defaults etc should matter in 0.22.

I was also curious why the instructions don't specify using the mc.sql
to create the database...that's what I used.

Thanks in advance.

Tom