What, No Binaries?
It ain’t so.
Yes, it’s true that MySQL 5.0.33-community is a source-only release. However, this does not mean that all future MySQL Community Server releases will be source-only! In fact, we are planning another (probably 5.0.35) Community release in the near future, that will include binaries that you can download from dev.mysql.com/downloads, same as always.
But don’t take my word for it, when you can read for yourself what Kaj Arnö has to say about it.
In the meantime, you can build 5.0.33 yourself. It’s not that hard — really!
On Linux, just unpack the source, cd into the root directory of the unpacked archive, and run BUILD/compile-<em>*</em>, where <em>*</em> looks like whatever you’re running. For me, that’s usually BUILD/compile-pentium-debug-max or BUILD/compile-amd64-debug-max. After that’s finished (takes about 20 minutes on my laptop, a 2.0 GHz AMD64 with 2 GB RAM), just sudo make install. You’ll need gcc and the other common GNU build tools installed, but these come with your Linux distro, right?
For Windows, it’s a bit trickier (at least for me), but can still be done using the free versions of Microsoft Visual C++ and Platform SDK that you can download from Microsoft.com.
For more information about building MySQL from source on any number of platforms, just Read The Fine Manual: MySQL Installation Using a Source Distribution. If you run into problems, you can also ask for help in the MySQL Source, Builds, Binaries forum.
Or get someone to build it for you. There’s no reason why you can’t share — that’s the beauty of Open Source.
“You’ll need gcc and the other common GNU build tools installed, but these come with your Linux distro, right?”
err,…not quite. On Ubuntu (darn, I can’t remember if it was before or after the Dapper to Edgy upgrade) I had no success at all compiling MySQL at all. For people that are new to compiling from source on Linux, the problems are: “What are the common build tools?” and, very, very important “Which version of these tools do I need?”
In my case, ./configure ran successfully - make failed, but after happily compiling 10 minutes or so. And the messages are not exactly indicative of the problem.
I It is true that some of these tools are listed in the Manual. However, it still did not work for me. I was lucky to get excellent help from Jay Pipes. In one of his blog entries, he stresses that you really need to get these tools and version of the tools too:
* automake version 1.9.6
* autoconf version 2.60
* bison version 2.3
* m4 version 1.4.4
* libtool version 1.5.22
And he also recommends to get these:
* gcc version 4.1.2
* make version 3.81
I also remember that order of installation is important too, but I don’t know if I listed them in required order here.
The thing is, either you are lucky and your distro takes care it or you don’t know about it and hit wall unless someone friendly helps you. After installing all that stuff, compiling ‘just’ works and you forget all about it. But it is one of the reasons why more experienced users say “ach..it’s not a big deal to compile” and excited newbies try and fail.
I was running Ubuntu and had to upgrade and get at least several of these components. For “pure” Debian it is likely to be the sane, or possibly worse.
Any idea when 5.0.35 binaries will be released? Over a month ago Kaj said it would be in about a month, and this is the first I’ve heard of it since then — I have a Google Alert set up for “5.0.35″ :-)
For anyone that happens across this post, MySQL on 3/12/07 released MySQL Community Server 5.0.37 with binaries.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#downloads