Buying a Unix system guarantees you a descent into Hell.
–Philip Greenspun
We’re back up and running (somewhat) normally, following ~18-ish hours of weirdness that stemmed from a badly botched update of WordPress. It started when I decided to bring the CMS software up to date — I’d been running on 2.8 for a while, and 3.0 being out, I thought perhaps I should consider updating things a bit. But version 3.0 of WordPress required a version of MySQL that I wasn’t using, so I needed to change database servers, and… you know what? It doesn’t matter. Point is, I had to change both the database backend and the CMS at the same time, and as you can well imagine that did not go well.
I blame MySQL, personally. As a database system it seems to be quite happy to fail in opaque ways; like its commercial brethren, it seems to pride itself on its inscrutability. As a piece of free software, it needs to be a thousand times harder than it should be, just to prove how much more advanced it is. The culprit was a bunch of SQL, written by the export tool, that the import tool proceeded to choke on. My SQL isn’t good enough that I could figure out what was wrong — it looked okay to me, but what do I know? Ultimately, I had to re-import the old database to the old database system, re-install an old version of WordPress, export from within WordPress itself, then bring the WP export back over to the new version of WP and the new database. Many, many, many new curse words were invented last night.
But it seems to work. Now. Euy.