Default collation in my.cnf [mysql]

[Luca Accomazzi]

Escuse the rambling, I am quite a bit frustrated. I love MySQL, but I believe the whole character set and collation part is an unholy mess. As long as you use ASCII (English) or UTF-8 you mostly ignore it and things don't bite you in the a$$, but otherwise...
My webapp keeps spewing out errors like this one: MySQL Error: 1267 (Illegal mix of collations (latin1_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation '=') when I compare a table.field with a @variable I previously set. Yes, I know I can SET NAMES, but I don't like to insert one more query in each and every webpage invocation. It makes for millions of unuseful queries to MySQL out of a server's workday.


So. This is a valid option in my.cnf:
[mysqld]
default-collation=latin1_general_ci

Is there an equivalent line which applies to [mysql]? I see I can set the default character set there, but how do I set the collation?

Also, where does one set the default collation for a PHP connection to the database?

On a more general note, is there a place where all options acceptable for my.cnf are listed?

Thank you in advance. I will sacrifice you the heart of my firstboth child, if needed.