Comment 3 for bug 622194

Given that the only change in a "new" database is the adding of about 768 KiB to the wt_gedcom table ... and nothing else happens ... the import does fail.
Changing the max_allowed_packet to 100M and it does work.

Changing it back to 1M, and re-importing ... the wt_gedcom table goes from 10.2 MiB to 9.0 KiB ... the other tables stay as they were.
And nothing else happens ... 20 minutes ... nothing ... there is no mysqld activity.

Changing max_allowed_packet to 2M ... wt_gedcom table goes to 1.2 MiB ... other tables are emptied ready for the import, and I get a "Loading data from GEDCOM: 0.0%" progress ... but again nothing then happens.

Changing back to 100M ... and it works again.

If the max_allowed_packet is smaller than the gedcom filesize it fails, MySQL doesn't attempt to chunk the gedcom file to get it into the table in packets that are "allowed".

MySQL 5.1.49 running on my local machine (hence I can change settings and stop/start mysqld at will). But for people using a shared hosting service, they are not going to be able to change a setting such as this themselves.

Mark