It looks like it looks like there are going a lot of discussions about future of MySQL Community Binaries, see for example this post and Kaj’s clarifications.
Obviously now it grew to a lot of speculations and many comments are far from real story. It is also really interesting to watch MySQL try to balance situation of maximizing revenues and minimizing missing off community at the same time. It is moving target and balance may shift in the future one direction or another depending on how things go.
Some of confusion I guess comes from my post where I speak about recent version and so recent binaries which were not available at that point. In many cases “recent” word seems to be omitted and people are just speaking about binaries in general.
As Kaj explains now there will be official MySQL Community binaries, including Windows but they will be rarely released.
For many users running old MySQL binary is not the problem, it is however the problem if you run into the bug, which may already be fixed in newer version but binary with bugfix is not yet available. I guess having bug fixes promptly available is one of the selling points of MySQL Enterprise.
Windows build specially come into the picture as Windows users are not used to building software and most do not even have tools needed to perform the build available. Furthermore there are no vendors which will create binaries for you as happens with Linux.
The good news are – this only applies to Official binaries. I expect there would be unofficial builds popping up, we for example published our build of MySQL 5.0.33 for Linux x86-64. Scott has provided builds both for Linux i386 and Windows. I guess over next few months community will establish trusted sources of MySQL Builds and you will be able to get good builds promptly with new community releases. As long as MySQL Enterprise sources continue to be available I expect people will create builds of these as well, under different name of course.
dotdeb.org is providing MySQL 5.0.x unofficial packages, including enterprise versions.
http://www.dotdeb.org/news
5.0.33 is not there yet, but 5.0.32 is available with apt-get install.
unofficial debian PHP packages are alsol available there, both for i386 and amd64.
May be those comments will collet quite a number of unofficial MySQL built, just like Kaj hopes about.
Webyog provides 5.0.33 for download.
(installer version for Windows only).
http://www.webyog.com/forums//index.php?showtopic=2988
Peter Laursen, if you have not changed the name, please add “built by ” to the version so that it is possible to identify who is affected by compiler, build or library bugs that may be in a particular build. I don’t suggest that your build is bad, just that these things happen and we need a way to identify the build if there is a problem discovered later. It also helps to know what version is needed to match core dumps if there is a crash problem.
This request is just to make support easier. It’s not an official statement by MySQL about how the trademark for MySQL’s Community or Enterprise servers should be used in builds. I don’t know if MySQL will have an official view on that or what it will be. Please don’t stop building because of this possibility – I trust that MySQL will be nice about it if it wants a change. About the worst you’re likely to get is a polite letter from someone in MySQL’s Community team asking you to make a change and saying sorry for the inconvenience.
“We use the following policy when updating MySQL:
Enterprise Server releases are meant to appear every 18 months, supplemented by quarterly service packs and monthly rapid updates. Community Server releases are meant to appear 2–3 times per year.”
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/many-versions.html
“I guess having bug fixes promptly available is one of the selling points of MySQL Enterprise.”
To be frank, this sucks! Since all that enterprise stuff started, binaries are published on mysql.org much-much less frequently. I’ve been waiting for build containing a fix (version .48) forever… And still waiting.
I am all sad because I started with mysql for its easiness and friendliness. I do not know how to build it for Win platform, and I do not want to know, I like the comfort and convenience of getting official binaries. And now that stopped. Sad, sad…
Needless to say, if going with mysql enterprise (i.e. spend money), I would consider M$’s product for more features and better query optimizer…