This is kind of an oddball case, but I'm reporting it anyway.
I have an install that is running 6.x-2.6, and for reasons I'm not quite clear has an obscenely old schema version listed. (Which could be erroneous). The result is that when trying to run update.php, I get an error that _system_update_utf8 is not defined in webform_update_3().
A little searching turned up this:
So I see why that call is there. However, judging by the age of the issue and the fact that said function does not exist anywhere in system.module, it looks like it's just a really really old update that shouldn't be needed anymore aside from wacky cases like my broken install. :-) That said, by design update hooks should be updated for API changes as well. So either webform_update_3() needs to be updated to whatever the equivalent is for Drupal 6's API (I'm not actually sure off hand what that is) or the super-old update hooks should be rolled out of the code and not included at all. (That's what core does.)
Comments
Comment #1
quicksketchYep, if anything this function would be removed entirely and we'd implement hook_update_last_remove() (or whatever it's called). We really shouldn't be supporting 4.7 to 6.x upgrades at this point. :)
Comment #2
quicksketch#666508: Unrecoverable error has occurred during update