r4335

what was the reason for removing the charset pulldown ? is not DEFAULT CHARACTER SET = a valid clause since 4.1.1 ?

The collation is more specific, and even contains the charset in its name. So, having the charset was superfluous here. And, it even lead to an SQL error on MS SQL. See issue #3101.

ah, i did not know that collation implies character set; seems logical in hindsight.

(is not so in server configuration; ie collation-server=xxx does not imply a fitting character-set-server=yyy, but produces an error that xxx does not work with latin1.)

Are you sure about what you say with regard to collation-server? My collation-server is "latin1_swedish_ci", which surely implies "latin1" charset.

quite sure, because that is what i just tried: i have

character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci

in my.ini[mysqld], and had just commented out the character-set-server= line. restarting the server after that aborted with "COLLATION 'utf8_general_ci' is not valid for CHARACTER SET 'latin1'".

(MariaDB 5.5.29, that is.)

seems to e that latin1 is the default if no character-set-server= is specified, so you probably got no error because latin1_swedish_ci CAN be used with it.
But it appears that the character set is not deduced from the collation, even though it would be both logical and simple to do so.

Exactly. Thank god this is the case when handling databases, tables and columns.