Sorry, but it's really bugging me.
By "hundreds", I do mean hundreds. A google for the error message itself turns up thousands of results, and every single PHP app I've tried with MySQL 5/strict has broken, most of them to the point where they simply won't function.
Yes, WP works for millions of people using anything but MySQL 5/strict, no argument there. But all of those previous versions of MySQL (possibly excepting 3.x, since I haven't personally tested it with WP) give warnings, while 5/strict gives errors (which is, technically, the proper behaviour).
Effectively, this means that all of these PHP apps are not coded properly. I know it's strong language, but if you turn warnings into errors and things break that badly, there is no other conclusion to draw. And as far as I can tell, that is *all* that strict-mode does. With strict-mode turned off, everything works just fine :) Except that a bunch of warnings are generated by MySQL.
Matt, I am always civil here. But this issue has happened more than once. When people (and hosts) started moving to PHP5, the same damn thing happened, and we were told to downgrade. This was not because there was a bug in PHP5, but because the code took shortcuts it shouldn't have, and when the bug was fixed, things broke. This is the same thing that's happening with the switch from MySQL 4 to 5. And there's no reason for it, aside from either bad or lazy coding.
I'm not *just* pinpointing WordPress, but of all the apps I've tried, it's the one I like best. phpMyAdmin, phpBB, SMF, TextPattern, etc. *all* have problems with strict mode for the exact same reason.
I'm surprised no one realizes how serious the problem could end up being.
And I'm still asking if this bug will be fixed by the 2.0 release.