Today I went through the fun task of updating my local MySQL installation to 5.1 in order to try out then new partitioning. The challenge here, was that I wanted to keep everything for fink in order (the same paths, and for the most part, the same options).

So first, you need to download the source for MySQL 5.1. Don’t get the Mac OS installer or tar!

Untar this to wherever is convenient, and pop open a terminal. Now we need to run configure with the crazy amount of options there are to make it work with fink. One issue I did find while doing this is that it didn’t want to detect fink’s readline, so I ended up configuring it with the included readline.

./configure --enable-assembler --with-extra-charsets=complex --enable-thread-safe-client --with-big-tables--with-innodb --with-archive-storage-engine --with-big-tables --with-embedded-server --enable-local-infile --disable-dependency-tracking --with-mysqld-user=mysql --mandir=/sw/share/man --infodir=/sw/share/info --localstatedir=/sw/var/mysql --libexecdir=/sw/sbin --sysconfdir=/sw/etc --bindir=/sw/bin --datadir=/sw/share/mysql --includedir=/sw/include/mysql --libdir=/sw/lib/mysql --with-readline --with-partition && make

This does *not* include all of the same options. I removed some of the storage engines which I will never use, including ndb, blackhole, federated, and the yassl extension which was deprecated. This also does not include ssl.

Now go grab some lunch, the configure is going to take a good 30 minutes depending on how powerful your Mac is.

The rest is simply your standard sudo make install.