I tested this but it did not at least directly work:
commit b8e537d55b467eb285a82842e73bb22732ef9ad6 (HEAD -> master-next)
Author: Otto Kekäläinen <o...@debian.org>
Date: Tue Sep 29 21:27:02 2020 +0300
Use build flag to enforce default charset as utf8mb4 (Closes: ##933063)
diff --git a/debian/rules b/debian/rules
index 819ac6ea0..12b162002 100755
--- a/debian/rules
+++ b/debian/rules
@@ -101,6 +101,7 @@ endif
-DSYSTEM_TYPE="debian-$(DEB_HOST_GNU_SYSTEM)" \
-DBUILD_CONFIG=mysql_release \
-DWITH_SSL=bundled \
+ -DDEFAULT_CHARSET=utf8mb4 \
-DPLUGIN_TOKUDB=NO \
-DPLUGIN_CASSANDRA=NO \
-DPLUGIN_AWS_KEY_MANAGEMENT=NO \
--->
MariaDB [(none)]> status
--------------
mariadb Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.5.5-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu
(x86_64) using readline 5.2
Connection id: 76
Current database:
Current user: root@localhost
SSL: Not in use
Current pager: stdout
Using outfile: ''
Using delimiter: ;
Server: MariaDB
Server version: 10.5.5-MariaDB-2-debug Debian 10
Protocol version: 10
Connection: Localhost via UNIX socket
Server characterset: utf8mb4
Db characterset: utf8mb4
Client characterset: latin1
Conn. characterset: latin1
UNIX socket: /run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Uptime: 27 sec
Threads: 22 Questions: 674 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 199 Open tables:
37 Queries per second avg: 24.962
--------------
