I bumped into a similar issue when installing on one of my servers, though the circumstances were a bit different.
In my case it's a Windows 2003 server of my own, running IIS, and a very recent copy of MySQL 5.0.41. Apparently MySQL 5 does some strange stuff with logins which is explained here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/old-client.html
The result was that wowroster (and a lot of other stuff, like some forums I wanted to install) couldn't even authenticate against the MySQL server. To solve this, I had to follow the procedure explained in the previous link, and everything was fine. Until...
I tried to install the new version of WoWRoster and, like yourself, I was informed that just the "client" side of my server was outdated.
I don't understand the whys and whats of MySQL, but it seemed strange that the client side was showing such an old version just because I changed the login method. I knew my actual server was 5.0.41. Anyway, I chose to ignore it--or rather, to tell the install to ignore it--by doing the following:
- Open install.php
- Find this line (around 529):
$client_version = mysql_get_client_info();
- Change to this:
$client_version = mysql_get_server_info();
That just tells the check to read the server version for both the client and server versions, and it passes. (There are a bunch of other ways you can get around this too.)
So far I have not had any issues. Maybe I will down the road, maybe I won't.
If you choose to do this same process always remember that it is non-standard and may cause issues and I will not be responsible for them. But until then, it seems to work.
(Maybe someone more savy in the ways of MySQL can explain to us the difference in server and client version and if the client version being outdated is a concern, or if only the server version really matters. If it turns out that the client version doesn't matter, perhaps we can remove the check for it in the install.)