RPMs and MySQL: Life is going to get a lot better!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read about and responded to questions on zenoss-users regarding the Zenoss RPM and MySQL.  Here’s a brief history if you’ve been one of the fortunate 5% of the community who has not encountered this problem.

SuSE, CentOS/RHEL, and Fedora are all RPM based Linux distros.  Among the many roles of a Linux distribution maintainer is stability.  Distro maintainers customize the kernel, make patches to software to improve compatibility, and draw upon other “vanilla” source code and customize it based on whatever is the overarching strategy for the distro.  For CentOS/RHEL it’s stability.  For Fedora it’s access to the latest and greatest software that’s been written.  I don’t know what it is for SuSE (haven’t really used it)…

When a distro maintainer produces an RPM of an open source software package, they give it a name and a list of dependencies that software requires.  This is where a problem has arisen with Zenoss: the various Linux distributors could not agree on a name for MySQL.

We’re an OSS company trying to stay in business and that means that when a paying customer calls and asks for support it’s really important to give them the support they need.  That’s how we stay in business.  So when it comes down to supporting paying customers or spending a few days improving the build system to support native packages the choice is always the customer!  Of course we welcome anyone that wants to help us out in maintaining packages for various distros, but so far very few people have stepped forward.

The most practical thing we could do when we built the RPM for the first time was to define our dependency against the Vanilla MySQL RPM.  Although it’s a pain in the neck it works - you can uninstall your native distro’s MySQL RPM and install the Vanilla one from www.mysql.com.  Icky but better than no RPM at all…

All of that is going to change in the next release.  Yesterday I committed a series of changes to zenpkg as well as our spec file that allows us to easily create RPMs using the native distributor’s MySQL package name.  If you’re under FC6 you’re going to get a zenoss RPM that Requires: mysql-server.  If you’re under SuSE/SLES it’ll be something different.

With this change you’ll be able to use yum to install (hopefully) all of the dependencies Zenoss has, which will make installation a lot easier.  I’m anxiously awaiting the next release because I hate to see people turned off to Zenoss because the installation isn’t as easy as it can be.  So it’s very exciting to remove this roadblock.