I really do not like arguing on forums, especially in a subject-oriented topic, but I really should say something...
I marked it as "solved" because you reported the case to be solved.
Well, OK, I'll ask for an excuse about this fact, since it was hard to notice the "seems to be" and "didn't break yet" words, and also hard for you to check the setup of MySQL with KOI8-R as default charset...
Who says so? Don't make false assumptions.
So, then, how many dozens of links you want me to write here for you to believe?
I say dozens because I can't remember all those hundreds of sites, that use PHPBB with Windows-1251 encoding for quite a long time, including those 4 forums that I had set up and still administer by myself. But if you really do not believe me, OK, I'll use google and will go and find you more links...
Well, that's a matter of what you consider to be better.
I consider the code can be called good if it's aware that some settings on a server, placed on the other side of the Earth, can differ from settings that a developer has on his own testing machine.
We recommend using utf-8. The russian-speaking community appears to be reluctant to use it, as most of them don't appear to be understanding the great benefits utf-8 brings in comparison to proprietary encodings. Imo not a bug, but expected behaviour. Even the moderator of the Russian support board is reluctant to understand the benefits of utf-8 and keeps on recommending proprietary encodings.
Surprisingly, huh? :-)
That's because not all the computers in the world know anything about UTF-8. But you can say for sure, that on the computers of 70% of internet users Windows is installed. And so if saying about Russian users, what encoding, do you think, will windows set up? Let me guess - Windows Cyrillic (cp-1251)?
You're german. That's good, but your extended latin chars are not so widelly used in your language for you to understand the big difference between loosing just some umlaut-chars (that can be easily replaced with ae, ue, oe) and loosing all the chars in a second of changing from one encoding to another. UTF-8 was made especially so that the first 128 chars are on the same places as they always were. So you wouldn't want to bother yourself with setting up an apropriate encoding upon connecting to the DB. Notice - it's a NEW version of DB, and it supports MORE different encodings for full-text search and better optimization of programming and searching. Not just the magic UTF-8.
And so the guys from PHPBB are prepeared to the fact that the DB can be set up in a differrent way, as well as user prefferences can be somethat different as well and they do the check and setup. And that's why their system works fine on every server I tried to set it up, not like coppermine, that could say only "Fatal Error:" and nothing more, just on the first run after the "Setup was successful" tabloid appeared.
Moderators will move threads accordingly if they consider issues an actual bug. Yours is imo not a bug: use utf-8 as recommended and everything will be dandy.
Maybe other devs want to have a say on this.
That's because you're thinking of it as if I'm just a geek of those "proprietary encodings". I made the coversion to the cp-1251 (by the way - it's used most often on the russian servers, but is not in the encoding setup of the cpg yet, only koi8-r is there already, thought that one is used mostly on *nix-based systems) only when I understood, that a connection to my ready and running phpbb is necessary. Since the whole site, all services and the forum (including, of course, the usernames) were in cp-1251 I made the conversion.
But in the first case I set it all up with the recommended UTF-8 settings. Who could tell me, that I'll get it all broken right after install only due to the KOI8-R setting on the hoster side? I'll tell you even more - the error was appearing only in Internet Explorer (v 6.0 + SP2). If trying it all in FireFox (1.5.2) or Opera (8.5) - it was OK. The whole thing was just about the encoding of the session ID, got from the cookie. I spent hours of investigation - why did IE made the cookie in one encoding but in DB it was checked with the data, got in another encoding? I got through the whole code of coppermine and checked, that EVERYWHERE the encoding was correct. The onliest thing was wrong - there wasn't a word about the connection to MySQL.
And also, man, if with UTF-8 it's so easy and fun, why is THIS forum using the Western Latin-1? You can not see and understand this, but the same Russian part of the forum looks weird, since half of posts are submited with the wrong encoding, preset by server side, and so to read the post one has to switch from Latin-1 to cp-1251 and vice versa.