Norbert Tretkowski

How Linux is Built

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 09:20:40 +0200

Vote on Planet MySQL for Serendipity

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:11:00 +0100

Since I found no Serendipity plugin for the vote feature on Planet MySQL, I took Diego Medina's JavaScript code and added it to the Serendipity default template. Here is the patch against Serendipity 1.5.5, which should be easy to adjust for other templates as well. Maybe I will find time to implement it as a regular Serendipity plugin sometime in the future...

The vote buttons are getting displayed only when viewing a single blog entry, not in the RSS feed and not in the article overview, and only if the entry is in the MySQL category. Your blog has to be on Planet MySQL already, and your readers need to have an account on the MySQL website to vote.

MySQL source tree available in Debian as binary package

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 12:25:00 +0100

MySQL supports a plugin interface since 5.1, which enables creation of server components. Plugins can be loaded at server startup, or loaded and unloaded at runtime without restarting the server. Most of these plugins require the full MySQL source tree during their build, which was not available in Debian as a binary package until I uploaded 5.1.54-2 to unstable last week. I had this item on my TODO list since MySQL 5.1 was uploaded to Debian unstable, because it is not possible for a Debian source package to build-depend on another source package. Thankfully, Clint Byrum from Ubuntu sent me a small patch which added the new binary package.

The first package making use of the new mysql-source-5.1 package is HandlerSocket, a NoSQL plugin for MySQL. It is currently waiting in Debian's NEW queue for approval, and I am sure we will see more plugins/packages (XtraBackup from Percona is another well known candidate) making use of the new binary package in Debian soon.

MySQL 5.5 and Debian

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 17:15:00 +0100

Since MySQL 5.5 was declared stable in December last year, I regulary receive e-mails from people asking when it will get uploaded to Debian. The good thing is that the initial conversion from automake to cmake has already been done by Clint Byrum from Ubuntu, and we are going to use his work as a basis for our packages. The not so good thing is bug #59078, an issue in libmysqlclient which breaks ABI compatibility. According to Lenz Grimmer from Oracle the MySQL upstream developers are already looking at it.

I am still not sure if it is a good idea to upload MySQL 5.5 in the current state to experimental, but I am definitely not going to upload it to unstable until this issue is fixed.

Update: I just had a conversation with Matthew Montgomery from Oracle, who told me that the SONAME of libmysqlclient will get bumped in 5.5.10, which is going to fix the problem.

Backports service becoming official

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:05:00 +0200

More than seven years after I initially started the backports.org project together with Team(ix), my employer at that time, it finally happened: backports.org became official last weekend, and moved to backports.debian.org! Alexander Wirt wrote a blog entry including some technical details, and there is also an official announcement on the debian-announce mailinglist. The most important point from a users perspective is to update your sources.list entry to:

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Thanks a lot to all people who made it happen, especially Alexander Wirt and Jörg Jaspert!

DRBD source dropped from Debian unstable

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:05:00 +0200

OK, not really... DRBD 8.3.7 is an official part of the Linux kernel since 2.6.33, and thanks to Dann Frazier we also have a backport of that patch in Debian's 2.6.32 kernel as well.

Until yesterday, the DRBD source package in Debian built a -utils and a -source package, the latter was now dropped. From now on, users no longer need to recompile the DRBD module after a kernel upgrade.

MySQL distro meeting in Brussels

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:45:00 +0100

Last month I spent two days in Belgium, after I got invited to the MySQL distro meeting. It was a non-public meeting with some people from Sun Microsystems and MySQL maintainers from different Linux distributions. It took place directly after FOSDEM (which I unfortunately could not attend due to personal reasons) at the Sun Microsystems Belgium office in Brussels. It was great to meet with Mathias Gug from the Ubuntu Server team in person. He had some really good ideas on how we could reduce the differences between MySQL in Debian and Ubuntu in the future. As a consequence, Debian will soon switch from Subversion to Bazaar for maintenance of most MySQL packages.

However, we were not only talking about the MySQL Server itself, but also about MySQL Cluster, MySQL Proxy, the MySQL Connectors and the MySQL GUI Tools. Giuseppe Maxia has a more detailed blog entry about the event, including the whole list of participants and some pictures. I fully agree with him: The meeting was a success, we also had a lot of fun, and we should do that more often!

Thanks a lot to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring, and of course to Lenz Grimmer for organizing the event.

Update: Forgot to link to the slides of the talk about MySQL in Debian that I have given at the event.

MySQL currently not available in Debian testing

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:25:00 +0100

Due to a bug in britney, the Debian testing migration tool, MySQL is currently not available in testing. The issue is known and being worked on already, and it is documented in the Debian bug tracking system.

Update: Meanwhile the issue was fixed, MySQL is available in testing again.

Semi-official backports of the Debian MySQL packages

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:45:00 +0200

MySQL 5.1 was uploaded to Debian unstable, and until we get it into testing, I am providing semi-official up-to-date backports of MySQL 5.1.36 and 5.0.84 for i386 and amd64 in my home directory on people.debian.org. I am providing MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 4.0 and 5.0, and MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 5.0. If you need MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 4.0 as well, please let me know.

MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 4.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.0/ etch-backports main

MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 5.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.0/ lenny-backports main

MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 5.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.1/ lenny-backports main

When MySQL 5.1.36 (or newer) made it into testing, I am going to move the MySQL 5.1 backport to backports.org, where it belongs. MySQL 5.0 will then completely disappear from the development branches of Debian.

Beware that the MySQL 5.1 packages do not include MySQL Cluster support, it was dropped from MySQL 5.1 a while ago, and is now available as a separate product. Unfortunately MySQL Cluster is not yet available in Debian, packaging it is one of the big items on my TODO list.

MySQL 5.1 moved to Debian unstable

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:11:00 +0200

Thanks to Christian Hammers, we finally have MySQL 5.1 in Debian unstable, which completely replaces MySQL 5.0. Please update all build-dependencies from libmysqlclient15-dev to libmysqlclient-dev and upload a rebuild version of your package.

As a positive side-effect, we no longer care about MySQL bug #41728, which was the reason why no newer version of MySQL 5.0 made it into testing since lenny got released.

New OpenPGP key

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:25:00 +0200

Because of the latest theoretical attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm (details), I created a new OpenPGP key:

pub 4096R/2789887A 2009-05-11 Key fingerprint = 6454 DC58 6A34 9B42 719A 1E3A 2F66 E80F 2789 887A uid Norbert Tretkowski <norbert@tretkowski.de> uid Norbert Tretkowski <nobse@debian.org> sub 4096R/54CE9E32 2009-05-11

It is signed with my old key 0x0F7A8D01, uploaded to keyservers, and will replace my old key soon.

First backports for lenny available

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:22:00 +0100

Alexander Wirt just wrote a mail to our mailinglist to announce that lenny-backports suite is ready for uploads. We will of course continue supporting etch-backports with security updates as long as etch will be supported by the Debian security team.

Happy backporting!

Help with Debian MySQL packages required

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:25:00 +0100

During the last few months I was the only person working on the MySQL packages in Debian, and I could really need some help. Currently there is MySQL 5.0.32 in etch, 5.0.51a in lenny, 5.0.75 in unstable and 5.1.31 in experimental, and I am also trying to get MySQL Cluster and MySQL Workbench into Debian. All in all it is way too much work for only one developer.

If you are an interested Debian developer/maintainer with a good knowledge in MySQL and shared library packaging, drop me a mail.

MySQL Workbench for Debian

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:56:00 +0100

Based on the official Ubuntu 8.04 package from Sun (thanks to Alfredo Kojima) I prepared a package of MySQL Workbench 5.1.7 for Debian. I am going to upload it to experimental soon, in the meanwhile it is available (amd64 only) from here:

http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-workbench/

Feedback appreciated!

OurDelta

norbert@tretkowski.de (Norbert Tretkowski) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 10:35:00 +0100

The MySQL packages in Debian still do not (and will never) include inofficial feature patches (beside the redirect output of error.log to syslog in MySQL 5.0, which is now part of the official MySQL 5.1 releases) like the ones from Percona or Google. Of course we add important bugfixes from newer (not yet released) versions of MySQL, but no feature patches.

If you are interested in a patched version of the Debian MySQL packages, take a look at OurDelta, their builds include patches (complete list) like mirrored binlog and InnoDB freeze. Upgrading from the official Debian packages of MySQL to the builds from OurDelta should work without problems, but please use Launchpad when reporting bugs against their packages, and not the Debian Bug Tracking System.