What’s new in the MySQL Yum repositories

A little over a month ago we launched the official MySQL Yum repository. An official repo was a long standing request from the community, and we’ve had it on our list of todos for a long time. We finally got it done, and in the process we modernized and improved our RPMs vastly and hopefully also made life a bit easier for the long suffering distro package maintainers, volunteers that provide the all important service of keeping MySQL fresh and usable in the Linux distros.

The greatest challenge in the project was to get to initial launch. Of course, a stable and reliable service is very important, but even more essential was that we wanted to deliver packages that really represented a leap forward in usability, integration with the underlying system and that not least closely matched the expectations of Linux users anno 2013.

We believe that we got at least part of the way towards those goals; uptake has been good and there are now thousands of systems out there running on packages from the MySQL repo. We have received valuable feedback, both negative and positive, and we have hopefully managed to respond to questions and help resolve problems in a good way so far.

Last week, we took the next major steps in the repo project, largely based on feedback and requests from the community. Here is a list of the major changes and additions:

Server milestone releases in the repo

• We are now releasing MySQL Server development milestones through the repo: the just released MySQL 5.7.3 is available now
• Simply enable in your repo setup. When the next milestone comes out, simply do a yum upgrade
• Milestone RPMs in the repo and RPMs downloadable from dev.mysql.com are now identical

More platforms and easier upgrades

• We added MySQL 5.6 packages for EL5. So the repo now has MySQL 5.6 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Oracle Linux 5, CentOS 5 and on Fedora 18 and 19 (stay tuned for Fedora 20)
• We added MySQL 5.5 packages for EL6. As EL6 ships with MySQL 5.1 “out of the box”, this provides a smooth upgrade path to our users. Edit your repo configuration and do a yum upgrade. One or more repeats will take you to whatever point you want in the sequence 5.1 > 5.5 > 5.6 > 5.7.

Better user control of product versions

• We split the repo by MySQL Server version. You set the major version explicitly in the repo config on your system – no one wants an accidental run of yum upgrade to perform a major version upgrade unexpectedly. MySQL 5.6 is the default.
• Simple workflow to move through version upgrades (see above)
• We split out separate Tools and Connectors repositories

More details

• Repo package download
• Installing MySQL from the Yum repository manual page
• Install & Repo forum
• Report bugs regarding repo packaging on bugs.mysql.com
• Morgan Tocker on installing MySQL 5.7 DMR3 with the official yum repos

Please let us know about your experiences with these new repositories, as well as any suggestions you may have to improve the experience. Add your comments here, or to report specific bugs or problems or request features, use bugs.mysql.com (there is a new “MySQL Repositories” category).