I spoke too soon. With a 6.x drush, 'drush si' succeeded, but trying to load the new site in a browser produces a white page; /var/log/apache/error.log says
PHP Warning: Table 'drupal.access' doesn't exist\nquery: SELECT 1 FROM access WHERE type = 'host' AND LOWER('192.168.19.2') LIKE LOWER(mask) AND status = 0 LIMIT 0, 1 in includes/database.mysql.inc o n line 135 PHP Warning: Table 'drupal.users' doesn't exist\nquery: SELECT u.*, s.* FROM users u INNER JOIN sessions s ON u.uid = s.uid WHERE s.sid = 'rhtogqfjg5r8h6u21h0952qkv7' in includes/database.mysql.inc o n line 135 PHP Warning: Table 'drupal.cache' doesn't exist\nquery: SELECT data, created, headers, expire, serialized FROM cache WHERE cid = 'variables' in includes/database.mysql.inc on line 135 PHP Warning: Table 'drupal.variable' doesn't exist\nquery: SELECT * FROM variable in includes/database.mysql.inc on line 135 PHP Notice: Undefined variable: variables in includes/bootstrap.inc on line 561 PHP Warning: Table 'drupal.cache' doesn't exist\nquery: UPDATE cache SET data = '', created = 1401060671, expire = 0, headers = '', serialized = 0 WHERE cid = 'variables' in includes/database.mysql.i nc on line 135 PHP Notice: Undefined variable: variables in includes/bootstrap.inc on line 568 PHP Warning: Table 'drupal.system' doesn't exist\nquery: SELECT name, filename, throttle FROM system WHERE type = 'module' AND status = 1 AND bootstrap = 1 ORDER BY weight ASC, filename ASC in includ es/database.mysql.inc on line 135 PHP Warning: Table 'drupal.url_alias' doesn't exist\nquery: SELECT COUNT(pid) FROM url_alias in includes/database.mysql.inc on line 135
I must not be living cleanly. "drush si" used to work for me...
On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com wrote:
I just wasted a few hours trying to track down the error
Table 'drupal.variable' doesn't exist
when doing drush si. Turns out that the releases of drush marked 6.x at https://drupal.org/node/97249/release?api_version%5B%5D=87 work fine with Drupal 6, but the releases at https://github.com/drush-ops/drush/releases all seem to exhibit the bug. I guess the github project releases simply aren't meant to support Drupal 6.
So, if you're trying to use drush with drupal 6, best to use the old download page, not the one at github.
Probably this was obvious to everyone else, but it was a surprise to me.