I just installed WordPress 2.8 on this host using Fantastico via cPanel X, and WordPress was telling me to upgrade to 2.8.2. I noticed that there was an automatic upgrade option; all I had to do was enter the FTP/SFTP for my site, and the WordPress script would handle the rest.

The first time I ran the upgrade, however, it threw an error back at me:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.2.zip

Unpacking the core update

Could not copy file: /public_html/wp-content/upgrade/core/wordpress/wp-comments-post.php

Installation Failed

Annoying, to say the least. A little bit of searching turned up a possible solution: checking and repairing the MySQL database tables. There’s no reason I can think of that this should work, but it’s a nondestructive method, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I had phpMySQL check and repair the tables in the WordPress database that had been created, and even though nothing appeared wrong, at least according to the status messages, doing this fixed the automatic update problem that I was having with WordPress!

This is where I first found this fix suggestion:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/277858?replies=10

But a little more digging turned up this blog entry:
http://www.kmcgraphics.com/2009/06/11/installation-failed-fix-for-wordpress-2-8-upgrade/

I’m also sending in this post my e-mail just to see if it will work.

Edit: turns out it does, but not as well as I would like.