TYPO3 Core

Same Problem with 4.0 final on 2 Servers having PHP 4.2.2 and 4.1.2, both with MYSQL 3.23.

I can confirm this bug;
Details:

Reference Index table is empty
Virgin 4.2.1 Installation errs with repeated msg: "The Reference Index table is empty...";

Procedure:

Clean + Empty Installation of 4.2.1 (src + dummy) - [SLES10 - Apache2/php5/mysql from distro];
- Install 1-2-3 - OK;
- Install > DB-Analyzer: Compare & Update all - OK
- Install > DB-Analyzer: add admin-user > OK;

Admin>Backend > Login [ > automatically choosen > ] > "About Modules"
Error:
"The Reference Index table is empty.... Tools>DB Check and update the reference index."
Doing as advised, results in
- "ref-index = OK"
Checking About>Modules, however again repeatedly results in
- "The Reference Index table is empty.... Tools>DB Check and update the reference index."

Info:
As soon as we added 1 Page, Template & Content,
AND updated the ref-index, the above ERR vanished.

As a full check for reference integrity is extremely expensive for big databases this issue cannot be easily fixed. The two options I see here are:

(1) Check if there is at least one row in pages, tt_content and sys_template and assume this to be a fresh installation if they are all empty.
This solution is not very reliable, as it will show the error message as soon as you create some content but no references which might be even more confusing.

(2) Change the error message so it states that this error should be ignored for new installations.
This has the problem of being non intuitive and maybe confusing but at least less confusing than the current state.

I have attached a patch that implements the first solution.

I uploaded a second version of the patch that only checks the pages-table. The first version did not work as the exec_SELECTcountRows call always returned 0

I have added another version that uses registry to remember if an update to sys_refindex has been made as suggested by Francois Suter on the mailing list.

michaels v8 (attached) works fine for me

committed to trunk in r7469