Re: [xwiki-devs] [VOTE] switching to UTF8 by default in 1.9M2

Hi devs, We've been tackling this proposal for some time, but we never took a final decision on it. So, I propose that we do this switch as soon as possible. Changes: - default encoding UTF-8 in the start_xwiki* scripts, xwiki.cfg and web.xml - remove the LANG= environment variable from the start script, since it's not needed - add the encoding configuration for the mysql jdbc connection URL (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/connector-j-reference-charsets.html ) Implications: - hsqldb instances will continue to work fine - for mysql and other DB instances, either the DB will need to be changed to work with the new encoding, or the wiki will have to be changed back to 8859-1. If we append characterEncoding=UTF-8 to the connection URL, then the storage will throw exceptions when trying to store an incompatible character, thus admins will quickly notice the problem and solve the issue, before users report loosing characters after a while (since without this setting the characters are silently transformed to '?' and this won't be noticed until the cache expires). We need to highlight this change in the release notes and upgrade instructions. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/