Warning:

  If you fail to read all of this document and ask questions that are
  already answered, I reserve the right to verbally abuse you.


Prerequisites:

  Python 1.5.2 or higher

   * http://www.python.org/

   * Versions lower than 1.5.2 WON'T WORK.

   * All versions from 1.5.2 should work. 1.6.x versions have not been
     tested. 2.1.3 and 2.2.1 have both been tested. 2.0.x has not been
     recently tested.

   * Red Hat Linux:

     o Make sure you have the Python development headers
       and libraries (python-devel).

     o For Python-2.x versions, this is python2-devel.

     o Note that Red Hat Linux, up to version 7.3, installs
       Python-1.5.2 as the python package. Starting sometime with 7.x,
       Python-2.x is available as the python2 package.

     o It appears that the next Red Hat release (probably 8.0) will
       install Python-2.2.1 as the python package and drop 1.5.2.

   * The python.org RPM packages follow the Red Hat 7.x conventions.
     Python-2.1.3 RPMS install as the python2.1 package.


  Distutils 1.0.2 or higher

    * comes starting with Python 1.6

    * 1.0.2 is included in Python version 2.1 and newer

    * http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/download.html


  MySQL 3.22.19 or higher

    * http://www.mysql.com/downloads/

    * Versions lower than 3.22 definitely WON'T WORK.

    * Versions lower than 3.22.19 might not work.

    * MySQL-4.0 is supported. Current release 4.0.2 alpha.

    * MySQL-3.23 is supported. Current release: 3.23.51.

    * MySQL-3.22 is deprecated in favor of 3.23, but still supported.

    * Red Hat Linux packages:

      o mysql-devel to compile; doesn't seem to come with the
	thread-safe client library

      o mysql and/or mysql-devel to run

    * MySQL.com RPM packages:

      o MySQL-devel to compile

      o MySQL-shared if you want to use their shared
        library. Otherwise you'll get a statically-linked module,
        which may or may not be what you want.

      o MySQL-shared to run if you compiled with MySQL-shared installed

    * I prefer the MySQL.com packages to the Red Hat packages.


  zlib

    * Required for MySQL-3.23 and newer.

    * Red Hat Linux

      o zlib-devel to compile

      * zlib to run


  A C COMPILER!!!

    * Most free software-based systems already have this, usually gcc.

    * If you have some Windows flavor, you have to pay extra for this.


Building and installing

  First thing to do is read setup.py. There are some variables towards
  the beginning that tell it where your MySQL include files and
  libraries are, compiler flags, loader flags, etc. You will rarely
  have to change this unless you have some kind of weird setup.

  After the main variables section, there is some platform-specific
  configuration. If your platform is not listed, this is where you
  want to add it. Note that most POSIX and UNIX-ish systems will work
  just fine the way it is.

  If you have an old version of distutils (pre-1.0.2), upgrade, or
  remove the parameters that are complained about. Upgrading distutils
  is the smart way to go.

  Note that recent binary distributions from mysql.com include two
  sets of client libraries: mysqlclient and mysqlclient_r. The latter
  are the "thread-safe" libraries, so use those if you can, and if
  threading is important to you. By default, thread-safe libraries are
  used. You can find out what you actually have by using the
  _mysql.thread_safe_client() function (returns boolean). Strangely,
  it appears that the thread-safe library is only available as a
  shared library.

  If you have the dynamic client libraries (on Linux, .so vs. .a),
  those will be used by default. If they are not on your standard
  loader path, you will have to set or adjust the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  environment variable (on Linux) or whatever your platform
  requires. Otherwise, you can adjust setup.py to link against the
  static library. If you are using standard RPM packaging, you
  shouldn't have to mess with this. If you compiled MySQL yourself,
  you might. There is a runtime_libraries_dir variable you can play
  with, but this does not work on all system; in particular, it
  doesn't seem to work on Linux gcc.

  Finally, putting it together:

  $ tar xfz MySQL-python-0.9.2.tar.gz
  $ cd MySQL-python-0.9.2
  $ python setup.py build
  $ su
  # python setup.py install

  
  Windows

    I don't do Windows.


  Zope

    If you are using a binary package of Zope, you need run setup.py
    with the python executable that came with Zope. Otherwise, you'll
    install into the wrong Python tree and Zope (ZMySQLDA) will not be
    able to find _mysql.

    With zope.org's Zope-2.5.1-linux2-x86 binary tarball, you'd do
    something like this:

    $ export ZOPEBIN=".../Zope-2.5.1-linux2-x86/bin" # wherever you unpacked it
    $ $ZOPEBIN/python setup.py install # builds and installs


  RPMs

    If you prefer RPMs, you can use the bdist_rpm command with
    setup.py. This only builds the RPM; it does not install it. You
    may want to use the --python=XXX option, where XXX is the name of
    the Python executable, i.e. python, python2, python2.1; the
    default is python. Using this will incorporate the Python
    executable name into the package name for the RPM so you have
    install the package multiple times if you need to support more
    than one version of Python.


  Red Hat Linux

    MySQL-python is pre-packaged in Red Hat Linux 7.x and newer.


  Debian

    Packaged as python-mysql.

       http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages


  *BSD

    MySQL-python is a ported package in FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD,
    although the name may vary to match OS conventions.


Acknowledgements

  Thanks go to Brian Fordham for cooking up an early version of setup.py.

  See the CHANGELOG for other individual contributions.


License

  GPL or the original license based on Python 1.5.2's license.


  Andy Dustman <andy@dustman.net>
  2002-07-10
