Should you want to be on the bleeding edge, or in my case, don’t want to download 70MB each day in a daily snapshot (especially when I’m getting build errors), you can use Bit Keeper Free Bit Keeper Client that at least lets you download the MySQL Repository. This client doesn’t allow commits, which is a good thing for those non-gurus in mysql internals (which definitely includes me).

wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client.shar
/bin/sh bk-client.shar
cd bk_client-1.1
make

By placing sfioball in your path you can execute.

sfioball bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.1 mysql-5.1

This took me about 4 mins, which seemed much quicker then getting a snapshot!

You can then get cracking with my instructions at Compiling MySQL Tutorial 1 – The Baseline.

A good reference in all this compiling is to take a good look at the MySQL Internals Manual. (which I only found out about recently)

If at a later time you want to update your repository to the latest, use the following command.

update bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.1 mysql-5.1

Documentation References

5.1 Reference Manual – 2.9. MySQL Installation Using a Source Distribution
5.1 Reference Manual – 2.9.3. Installing from the Development Source Tree
5.1 Reference Manual – 2.13.1.3. Linux Source Distribution Notes
MySQL Internals Manual

Requirements for compiling

To confirm earlier notes on minimum requirements for compiling the following details should be confirmed.

automake --version
autoconf --version
libtool --version
m4 --version
gcc --version
gmake --version
bison -version

My results running Fedora Core 5.

$ automake --version
automake (GNU automake) 1.9.6
$ autoconf --version
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.59
$ libtool --version
ltmain.sh (GNU libtool) 1.5.22 (1.1220.2.365 2005/12/18 22:14:06)
$ m4 --version
GNU M4 1.4.4
$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.1.1 20060525 (Red Hat 4.1.1-1)
$ gmake --version
GNU Make 3.80
$ bison -version
bison (GNU Bison) 2.1