There's like an entire class of open source project where you can no longer get support for them because they're old enough that the support channels are IRC rather than Discord or something but nobody's on IRC anymore (or rather hundreds of people are on the libera.chat channel, but no one is talking or reading questions)
Anyway I upgraded Ubuntu and now mysql is in a boot loop where it starts up, prints "Starting upgrade of data directory", prints "table SPECIFIC_TABLE_THAT_SHOULD_BE_THERE not found in InnoDB dictionary", then prints "aborting" and the process begins again. Most of the repair tools for mysql seem to assume the mysqld is *already running* rather than in a boot loop. There are 210 people in the #mysql irc channel on Libera and no one but me is talking. I'm not actually sure where to begin here!
So apparently the 5.7->8.0 upgrade is big and complicated
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57423155/upgrade-thousand-for-mysql-5-7-databases-to-latest-8-0-version
Mysql/oracle recommend you do NOT do this particular upgrade without performing a backup first and following various manual steps
I, of course, didn't even specifically know I was upgrading mysql at all, much less in such a major way, I was just doing a security-required upgrade of the OS itself. I wonder if debian or myql made a backup… sometimes I backup my tables before OS upgrades but not this time. "lol".
@mcc Any specific reason you stayed with MySQL instead of switching to MariaDB? Since it looks like you'll have to do a dump & restore in any case, I'd suggest you switch to MariaDB instead of using MySQL 8.
@jernej__s I installed mysql in the Obama administration. Ubuntu has been upgrading that same copy of mysql ever since. I have never heard of mariadb before today.
@mcc @jernej__s MariaDB happened at the beginning of Obama's administration, so it sounds like you may have decided to stay with MySQL afterwards. Pretty much the entire community moved over to MariaDB more than a decade ago already, so no wonder the channel is dead.
@dos @support my memory's fuzzy. It might have been while I was volunteering for the Obama *campaign*. I don't remember exactly when I set this vps up but I was just reproducing a setup from a previous vps