[Deukhoofd]

> And the `utf8` encoding, that does not fully support UTF-8 looks like it’ll stay around forever. ಠ_ಠ

No, it looks like the exact opposite. As the MySQL documentation clearly states:

> The utf8mb3 character set is deprecated and will be removed in a future MySQL release. Please use utf8mb4 instead. Although utf8 is currently an alias for utf8mb3, at some point utf8 will become a reference to utf8mb4. To avoid ambiguity about the meaning of utf8, consider specifying utf8mb4 explicitly for character set references instead of utf8.

[orf]

I think every developer has written the famous words: “at some point we will remove this”. The accuracy of that statement often seems to be pretty dubious.

[evanelias]

Doesn't seem dubious to me. I would expect it to be removed (or at least have the utf8 alias changed to point to utf8mb4) in the next major release. utf8mb3 was deprecated in the most recent release series (MySQL 8). For feature deprecation notices, MySQL consistently follows a pattern of deprecate in major release N --> remove/change in major release N+1.

[beatgammit]

Exactly. I don't believe something unless there's a time schedule, and even then I'm doubtful if it's further than "the next release or two".