ft_min_word_len unrecognized on Red Hat >= 9

[Kenneth Porter]

Installing Bugzilla 2.17.7 on Fedora Core 2.

Following the installation guide, I set ft_min_word_len in my.cnf and got 
this error in /var/log/mysqld.log:

/usr/libexec/mysqld: unrecognized option `--ft_min_word_len=2'

Apparently I'm not the only one. Googling for this turned up this user with 
the problem on RH9:

http://forums.devshed.com/t155106/s.html

Looks like there's something fishy with Red Hat's mysql build.