Since emerging the new mysql v4.1.14-r1 almost everyone of our company databases is down as the new installation uses utf8 by default instead of latin1 as with 4.1.14. Settings in my.cnf changing everything back to latin1 seem to be ignored. my.cnf settings are the default ones delivered via portage.
No real information here. Defaulting to utf8 is not a bug. If your settings "seem to be ignored", you need to described when they are ignored, post a relevant snip of your configuration and emerge --info output.