Upgrade from 1.1 to 1.2 on MySQL fails at table import_event_subscription

[Nigel McNie]

As reported here: http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1228

My analysis of the issue is here: http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1228#post6245

[Richard Mansfield (richard-mansfield)]

I have been able to reproduce this bug, but so far only in the
case where the database's default collation is different from the
collation on the name column of event_type.

If both are set to latin1_swedish_ci, then the upgrade runs for
me without problems.

I'm not sure how databases are getting into this state or how
common this problem is, but just refusing to upgrade any db with
a default collation other than utf8_unicode_ci is not a solution.

If there's a good reason to believe this problem is widespread,
then we should compare the two collations (default db collation
and name column of event_type) and refuse to upgrade if they are
different.

I think we should also replace the notice we used to have on the
admin page that tells people if their db is not utf8, warns them
what bad things might happen, and encourages them to convert to
utf8.

[Richard Mansfield (richard-mansfield)]

I have now added a specific check to ensure (default db collation == collation on event_type(name)). Once the next release is out this will stop people from upgrading their dodgy dbs until we work out what the problem really is.