Today MySQL is officially joining the GitHub community, with the launch of a beta GitHub repo for MySQL Server.

Why We’re Doing It

GitHub has become the place to be for successful open source projects; it has a large and rapidly growing user base, it is robust and fast, and it provides excellent tools for building and supporting vibrant open source communities. All this, plus the fact that lots of projects that are built on top of MySQL source code are on Github, meant that the choice was pretty obvious for us when we started looking for a new code hosting service.

This also means that we are switching our day to day development activities to use Git. The MySQL org is highly distributed, with many developers working from home and others working out of Oracle offices in almost every corner of the world, so it was a given that we needed a distributed version control system. Another requirement was that the system we chose had to have a large and active community around it; as we all know so very well, a large, competent and enthusiastic user base, coupled with openness, tend to make a system much more flexible, robust and better performing. Git fits the bill very well, with good performance, lots of useful tooling from the large community of Git users and a boatload of features that will make MySQL developers’ lives easier.

How to Get Started

Want to get stuck in?

The home of MySQL on GitHub is at http://github.com/mysql, and here are the basics of using the repo:

Cloning over http: 
$ git clone https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server.git 
 
Over the native Git protocol (requires SSH key on the GitHub server): 
 
$ git clone git@github.com:mysql/mysql-server.git 
 
(The download size is ~ 410 MB)
 
Available branches: 
 
$ git branch -r 
 
origin/5.5 
origin/5.6 
origin/5.7 
origin/HEAD -> origin/5.7 
 
Checkout of MySQL 5.6: 
$ git checkout 5.6 

You can find a lot more in depth information in GitHub’s excellent documentation.

So, What Does ‘Beta’ Mean?

It means that we may change things around on GitHub for a while still, so we encourage everyone to exercise a little bit of care.

Switching source code management system is a significant change for any development project. When you have hundreds of developers and contributors, lots of surrounding infrastructure for build, test and publication of source code and binaries, with processes to coordinate all of this, and when halting development for any period of time is an absolute no-go, the scope and complexity of change becomes huge.

This means that we are not quite done yet with our switch to Git. So the code we are publishing on GitHub now is an export from our existing Bazaar source code repo. That will change when we switch development to Git; at that point our GitHub repo will become a copy of our internal development Git repo. When we do that switchover we will have to break continuity, so that if you have created your own forked MySQL repo before the switch, you will be unable to pull code updates to that repo after the switch. You will have to fork again, export your commit history from your old fork and apply that to your new fork. We will of course make sure to give a heads up when that switchover point approaches.

So the “beta” label should be taken to mean that the MySQL repo on GitHub is a correct and fully usable Git repo, but we do reserve the right to tweak and tune things for a little while, and at some point in the near future, when we go out of beta, we will need to break continuity.

Contributing

A basic question we expect to see from the GitHub community is “How do I contribute back?” For some projects, it is a simple matter of issuing a pull request to ask the upstream project to review and possibly merge in the changes you are contributing. In our case, we need to ask for a little bit more. The MySQL Server Team blog has a good step by step guide for those who want to contribute, and we encourage those who are interested to head over there for more information.

We will look for ways to better connect our contribution process with our presence on GitHub, and if you have suggestions, please let us know in the comments section below. For now, we promise to make sure that pull requests get a response with information on how to contribute “the right way”.

Let me end this posting by saying that we really hope that our presence on GitHub will be useful to everyone with an interest in our code, whether for their own development or simply as a way to keep up with the rapid pace of MySQL development in general. I would also like to thank the GitHub team for welcoming us into the fold, in particular Sam Lambert, who has been a very helpful guide along the way.

And if you have suggestions for how we can optimize our usage of GitHub, or if you should encounter issues with the repo, please let us know in the comments section.

Happy hacking!