In many files there are about 80-100 references to $GLOBALS['charset'] (or just $charset) variable, which is always set to 'utf-8'. It is not a change that should go now, but after 3.4 is released I propose to: - remove all references where it is used to generate HTTP headers and HTML (we already have it hardcoded in many places) - remove this variable and introduce it as a constant or, if only a few references remain, just use string literals
A quick glance at code also revealed some a possible bug in comparison with $charset_of_file - this var stores one of MySQL compatible charset names, while our variable stores "utf-8", not "utf8".
I can prepare an appropriate patch and commit it after 3.4 is released.