Errors when adding external table with unknown column types

Hm. Yep, this is with the latest, bleeding edge cvs up -dPC.

I'll try and do some debugging a bit later as an attempt to figure out where this is coming from. I realize it's hard to debug on your side without a copy of my data.

Hm. Well this fixes it. But I'm not sure that this is the right spot for this... seems like other stuff should be breaking too.

Hm. Weird. This is a very pesky bug to track down.

If I add one external table, it doesn't happen.
If I add two or three external tables, it doesn't happen.
If I add ALL of the tables, I get this error.

Patch doesn't make a difference. Hum..

Hahaha. Oh, this is quite literally CRAZY! ;) http://www.lullabot.com/articles/quick_and_dirty_debugging to the rescue!

Remember back in #424470: "no Schema type for mysql type enum/timestamp" how I was getting error messages from Schema module about how enum and timestamp aren't valid column types? And also that I'm importing data from an external database?

Well!

It turns out, that the first of those error message calls theme('placeholder') thanks to %table and %fieldname in the string. The very first thing theme() does is call init_theme(), since the theme system hasn't been initialized yet on this request. That will query the system table to get a list of themes (the first query that fails), not find anything since the system table doesn't exist in my external database, and then it's all downhill from there.

So, uh... I'm not really sure what you can do about this problem, but at least we know what causes it. ;) I guess one fix is to change % to @ in the schema.module message so that it's not initializing the theme system too early. Any other ideas?

In other words, steps to reproduce:

1. Create a database called "external"
2. Import the following table into it: (doesn't have to be this one; anything with enum or timestamp columns will do):

CREATE TABLE `cms_cpg_albums` (
  `aid` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
  `description` text NOT NULL,
  `visibility` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
  `uploads` enum('YES','NO') NOT NULL default 'NO',
  `comments` enum('YES','NO') NOT NULL default 'YES',
  `votes` enum('YES','NO') NOT NULL default 'YES',
  `pos` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
  `category` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
  `pic_count` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
  `thumb` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
  `last_addition` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
  `stat_uptodate` enum('YES','NO') NOT NULL default 'NO',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`aid`),
  KEY `alb_category` (`category`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=13 ;

3. Change your $db_url in settings.php from:

$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename';

to:

$db_url['default'] = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename';
$db_url['external'] = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/external';

4. Go to admin/content/tw and add the external.cms_cpg_albums table.
5. Bask in the warm glow from sheets of flaming red errors.

Fixing title to be more descriptive.