Bench failing, on mariadb settings, even though mariadb settings are correct

Install / Update
1

using the latest version of bench
bench new-site worky
MySQL root password:

Creation of your site - worky failed because MariaDB is not properly
configured to use the Barracuda storage engine.
Please add the settings below to MariaDB’s my.cnf, restart MariaDB then
run bench new-site worky again.

[mysqld]
innodb-file-format=barracuda
innodb-file-per-table=1
innodb-large-prefix=1
character-set-client-handshake = FALSE
character-set-server = utf8mb4
collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8mb4

================================================================================

even though mariadb is showing:
innodb_file_format… Barracuda
character_set_client… utf8mb4
character_set_connection… utf8mb4
character_set_database… utf8mb4
character_set_filesystem… binary
character_set_results… utf8mb4
character_set_server… utf8mb4

latest version of bench… any ideas?
Your MariaDB connection id is 45
Server version: 10.0.38-MariaDB-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 Ubuntu 16.04

2

Do you have all the required mysql/python libraries installed?

3

All good, ended up uninstalling the distro version, and installing latest stable, this seemed to have fixed the issue