[csw-maintainers] MySQL shared libraries - how about /opt/csw/lib?

[Philip Brown]

On Saturday, January 1, 2011, Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org> wrote:
> "Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski" <maciej at opencsw.org> writes:
>
>> I'm currently working with MySQL 5.x packages.  I've looked again at
>> the mysql libraries and noticed that they are placed under
>> /opt/csw/mysql5/lib/mysql.  For example:
>>
>> /opt/csw/mysql5/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15
>>
>> I don't quite see a reason for this library to be there.  We do
>> compile packages that depend on MySQL libraries, and these binaries
>> have to embed the right RPATH in order to work properly.  Why do we
>> first hide these library deep under /opt/csw/mysql5 only to have
>> trouble finding them later on?

I think for two reasons:

1. a bunch of programs using mysql, may have only a single top level
  --with-mysql=/path/to/prefix/here

2. I think it's more than just shared libraries: there's a bunch of
utilities, and we wanted to make sure if there are multiple versions
that each has the matching utils for it.

If we wanted to go with a standard of "we only support ONE version of
mysql in 'current' at one time, so okay to compile with
--prefix=/opt/csw"
then that would be different... but we've had multiple spectacular
failures at this sort of thing in the past two years, so perhaps this
is not a good long term strategy, particularly for something as
important as mysql.