[CentOS] Upgrading MySQLdb

Mon Jun 28 13:31:05 UTC 2010
Whit Blauvelt <whit at transpect.com>

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 08:54:49AM -0400, Jim Perrin wrote:
> 2010/6/28 Tsuyoshi Nagata <nagata3333333 at jp.fujitsu.com>:

> > Your answer is just install MySQL5.1 from source code.(make install)

> That's a horrible idea. At least use the package management system so
> that dependencies can be tracked properly. Installing from source
> builds directly is bad for a number of reasons.

I get the theory behind why you say it's a "horrible idea." In practice, not
so much. In many years of building key programs from sourch on top of a
half-dozen different distros, for use on production servers, I have never
had a problem that could be attributed to not going through the distros'
package management systems. 

Now, I'm careful that if one program's libraries are going to get used by
something else, that I build that something else by hand too - I'm not
unmindful of dependencies, and if I were obviously stuff could fail.

But seriously, aside from the nice theory about how each package management
system cures all dependency problems (which isn't 100% true), how many
people have actually found themselves in trouble from, say, building their
own LAMP stack on whatever distro, and skipping the package management
system bottleneck entirely? Maybe I've just had rare good luck with it, but
for me it's worked without problems, ever. That said, it's become less
necesary in recent years, as the distro packages have gotten better. Yet I
don't run a single system without a few programs built from source. Despite
the theory, it has _never_ been a problem.

Best,
Whit