Upgrade nearly painless

The WordPress SpamKarma plugin was complaining about invalid SQL syntax. A little investigation showed that SpamKarma was expecting MySQL 4.0 or newer, but reluctantly allowed you to use MySQL 3.x as long as you accepted there might be some problems. I’d had other problems with the old versions of software that were part of Fedora Core 3.

I decided it was time to upgrade to Fedora Core 4. I don’t know for sure, but I think I’ve been on FC3 for a couple of years now. I would rather upgrade to Debian Sarge, since this machine is really just a server now, and I hardly ever use X Windows on it. But that would require too much work. It appeared I could upgrade from FC3 to FC4 using yum, with minimum downtime, so I set aside some time today to do it.

The upgrade is now finished. It was surprisingly smoothly, except for one thing. Inn won’t run. I can’t even rebuild the history files with makehistory – it dies with a SEGV. I’ve tried all sorts of things, and I’ve tried writing to Russ, the main developer. I have a bad feeling that I’m going to have to switch to installing from source, and I don’t want to lose the advantages that you get when you let somebody else (in this case, the Fedora team) manage the upgrades and dependencies.