[Mediawiki-l] Problems upgrading

[Tim Doyle]

I am attempting to upgrade from v1.5.4 to 1.6.8.

I have PHP 5.1.2 (apache2handler) and MySQL 4.0.18.

I followed the instructions at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading_to_1.6 and

* Backed everything up
* Unpacked the new files into the existing directory
* Attempted to run the update script, at which point I received an error:

"Specified key was too long. Max key length is 500 (localhost)"

I notice that Terry Poperszky posted this same issue to this list 4/28/06
with no reply. Same with Thomas Klein on 1/24/06. 

I found that Brion answered this on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Running_MediaWiki_on_Windows#Specif
ied_key_was_too_long.3B back late last year with the following suggestion:

- Run MySQL 4.0, or set default MySQL charset to latin1 instead of utf-8, or
install 1.5beta. --brion 08:20, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
- Another option is to alter the database you want to use to use the latin1
default charset: ALTER DATABASE db_name DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1;

Since I am already running MySQL 4.0, so that solution won't work. 

Should I attempt to alter the database to use latin1? If so, where and how
do I make that change? Will that affect just that database, or any others?
Will that change affect only the database that the update script is
attempting to create, or will it affect the existing one?

Thank you, and sorry for the novice questions,

Tim Doyle