[horde] v1.2 latin1 to 5.x utf8

[Vilius Sumskas/LNK]

> Howdy horde devs! 
> 
> I started this discussion on IRC and had to continue it here, I 
> noted what came out of that here so as not to waste anyone's time!
> 
> We’d love to get your feedback on our approach to moving our old 
> install’s MySQL latin1 tables to utf8.
> 
> Specifically, three things:
> 
> 1. Do you see anything that this approach is overlooking?
>    From the IRC: yunosh pointed out PHP-serialized-data columns as a
> point of concern and we’ll be factoring that in ASAP.
> 2. What did you all experience regarding this issue when creating 
> upgraded scripts?
> 3. Would you be open to patches to implement this in the various 
> migration scripts?
>    From the IRC:  yunosh mentioned that patches or scripts similar 
> to mnemo-convert-to-utf8 would be great. Now, initially the postgres
> and sqlite verisons would be no-ops since we have no data on if its 
> even a problem there (because we‘ve only ever used MySQL w/ horde). 
> Does that seem like a reasonable approach?
> 
> Here is the general approach to the problem: 
http://drmuey.com/?do=page&id=156
> 
> I can send the horde specific testing we did based on that approach 
> if you like, suffice it to say it worked smashingly going from 1.2 
> latin1 tables to 5.1.2 utf8.
> 
> Thank you for your time!

Approach looks fine however you should not assume that default is latin1. 
Various Horde installations could be running cp1257, cp1252, etc. If you 
want patches to be accepted into main git tree they should work for most 
users out of the box. Also keep in mind, that even though MySQL database 
was set to latin1 Horde administrator could have set Horde's charset 
parameter to UTF-8. I'm not sure about how MySQL would handle ALTER 
statement in that case.

-- 
   Vilius