Hi!
Hunh.
!!!
Upgrading from that means that date formats are returned differently so how we display dates would need to be changed,
Not really, even though mediawiki has automatic date formatting both directions, we store dates now as VARCHAR(14) or CHAR(14) - nothing would change.
there's authentication issues because the password field is longer and more secure so bots would need to be fixed,
not applicable to application side at all, this is just how mysql clients authenticate to mysql server, not how mediawiki users.
we'd have to parse the articles to make them "safe" then "convert" them to unicode,
unfortunately, our articles are beyond BMP, so there'd be no way to make them 'safe' nor 'convert' them to unicode (actually, no need to convert anything, they are in unicode _at_the_moment_).
there'd be several problems just in going to MySQL 4.1 -- but wouldn't it be worth it in the end to continue to upgrade all the way to 5.1 for more streamlining and getting rid of possible bugs like this one: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=32707 "It was possible to force an error message of excessive length which could lead to a buffer overflow."
there're various other ways to crash a server, thats why we don't allow everyone to talk to our database servers.
Is there a group that's specifically working on issues that would need to be overcome to upgrade our MySQL?
no, should there be one? we have 5.1 servers in pool, and they seem to work, by the way, with current application.
Cheers, Domas