[horde] charset problem upon upgrade

[Joonas Hämäläinen]

Hips,

I'm trying to do upgrade from old horde installation to present stable 
version. Most of it goes nicely, but profiles get messed somehow. Or if 
I get them show correctly, I have feeling I have done a bit hacky 
solution which might bite me in leg later.

Old system is Horde 3.1.3, Imp 4.1.3, Kronolith 2.1.2. It runs on CentOS 
4.7, mysql 4.1.22, php 4.4.8, apache 1.3.x. Server locale is en_US.UTF-8.

New system will be Horde 3.3.3, imp 4.3.3, kronolith 2.3. Running CentOS 
5.3, mysql 5.0.45, php 5.2.8 and apache 2.2.x. Server has also 
en_US.UTF-8 locale.

There wasn't any character problems in old system, even as it has been 
upgraded from older centos to current, in which system changed to 
default utf-8. Now however, when I import database to new server, I 
start getting really weird behaviour.

If horde settings have internal charset as utf8, all umlaut characters 
disappear. If I create new profile, all old profiles are gone, and only 
newly created remains. If I edit old profile, it works.

I see characters correctly from mysql console and mysqladmin, but it 
appears then broken when looking at horde. I have managed to convert 
them so that it looks correct in horde, but then it doesn't look right 
at mysql console nor mysqladmin.

There was some sidenote about mysql alter table not doing charset 
conversions to serialized arrays (exactly what these profiles are in 
database). Is this really case, and is it then a script what is needed 
to do this conversion?

It is only profiles which has this issue (seen in imp for example, with 
signatures). Kronolith calendar entries are shown correctly this far.

Any pointers how to get around this issue? It is hundred of users who I 
suppose would be quite unhappy to lose their profiles, so I hope I don't 
have to take that path to get upgrade finally done.

-Joonas Hämäläinen