jimsky7

This is a really nasty deep-down bug…we sometimes see some feature added to WP that later on fails, but it doesn’t happen very often. WP is a very cool system with a dedicated maintenance and development crew. The auto-upgrade feature saves me hours every time a new WP is released, so I particularly wanted it to work. It’s not clear why it works on some of my 25 blogs and not on others, however.

Anyone know how to report this bug so it gets fixed in the future?

Hey @harabanar – you found essentially the same thing! I didn’t see your response because I was on my other computer debugging this process. I don’t have the option of moving my docroot, sorry, because I have about 25 WP instances that are affected by this bug. I’ll just hack the code in fs_connect() for now.

I don’t have the wp auto-update plugin and my plugins were all deactivated and also moved to another directory so the plugins directory was empty when I upgraded. Same failure – instant “Installation failed”

I have traced through the code that performs the auto-upgrade and for reasons not yet known to me it checks to see if the directory “/” exists (it’s checking for ABSPATH and WP_CONTENT_DIR before it begins upgrading) and the check fails … so my upgrade stops. No error message is being returned from fs_connect() [in file wp-upgrader.php] which is the routine that is called to check for existence of various directories before an upgrade can begin. I don’t see why there’s no error message generated (yet) in fs_connect(). I modified the code so it would skip checking if the directory name is “/” and my upgrade to 2.8.3 was performed just fine – took about 60 seconds. (It would be pretty goofy if the filesystem was OK and “/” didn’t exist, wouldn’t it?)

I’ll file a bug report.

@paulandrew – did you get it worked out? I currently am using 75M max memory both for PHP5 and for WP and I get the same thing – no message other than “Installation failed” – it doesn’t even try to download the WP file. On this particular server I was auto-upgrading until 2.8.2 failed. I had to manually load the files.

I successfully auto-upgrade on many servers, even versions 2.8.2 and 2.8.3, but on some servers it just fails like this without any other error message.

Plugins correctly upgrade on this (the failing) server. Same log-in info, and using SFTP in all cases. The plug-in upgrades are also very fast and always succeed. The full WP upgrade still fails.

As a test I chmod’d files to a+rw and it still didn’t help.

The fix indeed works.

Software may have bugs, but this is one of the worst I have seen in WP and it just happens to have hit a bunch of us.

The problem was that in the forgot-my-password process a URL was generated that included “special chars” which “break” the process – the fix is to generate only a-z an 0-9, and this fixes the problem. WP 2.5.2 SHOULD DEFINITELY fix this! It is a big problem.

About a dozen of my WP users (I host for them) had this problem and could not articulate what was happening. It then took me 2 hours to figure out the problem. This must be happening thousands of times and places around the world. I will submit whatever report I can in order to try to encourage a QUICK update to 2.5.2 because this is truly a nasty bug.

I also experienced the “re-log-in” following the upgrade and it did also lock me out so I had to use forgot-my-password and that’s when I discovered (and also independently cured in my code) the problem.

All flaming aside, it was a bug that somebody just didn’t catch and it just needs to be fixed ASAP. My customers are flaming me with “why did you ever recommend WordPress because it’s so unstable and doesn’t work right…” and I’m having to defend WordPress and honestly it’s tough. I just tell them “the software is free and it’s worth a zillion dollars if you had to write it yourself, so please bear with me while I fix the bug and then later on WP will fix it as well.” But it still makes them nervous.

Relax folks but make sure that the right people hear about the bug.