A broken upgrade? NO! NEVER! (hardly ever…)

HELLO TO THE GOOGLERS DROPPING IN REGARDING WP-CONTENT!

If you’ve stopped in, this pertains mostly to the use of automatic updates over SSH2 not working for me in WordPress 2.8. If you’re not experiencing this problem, I don’t think this write-up will be of much help. But feel free to stick around a while. We’ve got snacks.

After upgrading to WordPress 2.8 I discovered that this update has broken automatic core and plugin updates for me. I use SSH2/SFTP as I don’t trust/like/need/support FTP, and the SSH log only shows that the PECL module is opening a connection and then closing it, with WordPress returning only the following to to the browser window.

Unable to locate WordPress Content directory (wp-content).

I dug through how WordPress handles upgrades, and tracked this all down to the /wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-ssh2.php file. Replacing the version in 2.8 with the one from 2.7.1 restores full functionality but this is obviously NOT optimal, because that rewrite happened for a reason. I’ve got a diff file and some debug logs, and I’m sitting down to out which function is failing if I can (FYI, I probably can’t). I look forward to filing my first real bug report and then having it closed with my first instance of “Will not fix”, “Works for me”, or “Cannot duplicate”.

UPDATE 6/13/2009 @4:40PM EST

The rewrite happened because use of the ssh2.sftp wrapper was introduced, replacing the older version of the function which copied contents into temp files and pushed the data around. It was a drastic speed increase, but it doesn’t bloody work on my system for one reason or another.

UPDATE 6/13/2009 @7:16PM EST

I’ve officially cried “uncle!” and turned to the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in blogging, the WordPress forums (as well as their bug reporting and ticketing system). I also identified the patch which introduced the code which caused SSH2 support to go flying off the rails for me.

UPDATE 6/18/2009 @4:17PM EST

The WordPress team has marked this bug as belonging to milestone 2.9. There is a slim chance that maybe I’ll see some relief in 2.8.1, but more than likely they’re going to yet again refactor how SSH2 works for automatic upgrades. If this changes, I will update this post accordingly. For now, I believe I may have to simply let it be broken.

Other than that, this round of upgrades has been mostly painless, and the hyped speed increases are not just hyperbole. WordPress 2.8 feels only slight underbaked beyond SSH2 hiccups. I confess that I haven’t had a chance to play with the redesigned sidebar widget administration yet though, as I haven’t even figured out how I want to implement support for sidebar widgets into this theme.

The bug that deletes some custom fields if you update posts that have them is still there. No idea how to begin tracking that one down, but I can state authoritatively that it’s theme and plugin independent. Why am I linking to some dudes blog, and not the official WordPress bug tracker? because I don’t even know where WordPress keeps its bug tracker.

I also had to reset WordPress Blog stats because WordPress was tracking the wrong subdomain for all of my stats. The numbers tallied up with Google Analytics and the AWFFull log grinder, but the URLs were all effed up. I fixed the problem on the WordPress.com backend, and in the process lost months of aggregated history.

The upshot to this loss is that I hope to have a new round of search hit inspired commentary ready to go in a week or two.