installing nightly .. [Notice] DB_DataObject error []: MDB2 Error: syntax error

[Gijs Hillenius]

Hi there!

Now that I have GNU Social Master, running, I wanted to do the same for
Nightly. It's the ActivityPlugin that interests me. If that works,
GnuSocial is, IMHO, the easiest server instance to get up and running.

At the same time, redoing an install would help me draft a text on how
to do this on a Debian Bullseye server.

So last evening I started again, on a clean system, with Nightly.

Here is preliminary report:

1) I need to iron out one wrinkle in the selection of required PHP
packages; one of them brought along (again) php-pear. I apt purge'd it.

2) the installation (install.php) has a problem trying to add files to

/var/www/gnu-social/file/
/var/www/gnu-social/file/avatar

once I manually create these subdirs /file and file/avatar, the
installation finished cleanly. It looks like others have stumbled across
this too.

So, yay!

Except that going to the GnuSocial site now gives me this:

,----
| INTERNAL SERVER ERROR
| [Notice] DB_DataObject error []: MDB2 Error: syntax error
`----

I can log in: but then I see the same error.
I can visit the settings menu, but changes are not saved.
I can go to the admin settings, and there changes are saved.

I wonder it this is a side effect of (once again) PHP packages from
Debian interfering with PHP from Gnu Social. I need to debug this.

There is nothing relevant in the MySQL error log (yet).

The syslog shows:

Handled serverError (500) but cannot output into desired format (NULL):
'[Notice] DB_DataObject error []: MDB2 Error: syntax error'

When I have time I will crawl over the reported issues here
https://notabug.org/diogo/gnu-social/issues

The mailing list archive made me none the wiser.

Kind greetings

Gijs