Colin Charles Agenda

Both Giuseppe and Kaj have blogs in languages that I don’t understand. In fact, even Planet MySQL has feeds for German, Spanish and French blogs.

Want to keep up with non-English based blogs? Happen to use Google Reader? Then use their nifty “Translate into my language” feature.

I can now read Giuseppe’s latest Italian blog. Current content is about MySQL 5.1 for the impatient – a feature overview of what’s new and cool.

Last week I found out about the Open Source Economy Conference 2008 held in Putrajaya, Malaysia on the 19th of November 2008. Its co-organised by Sun and the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC). Its also the “launch” of MySQL in Malaysia.

I only mention this because I’m speaking – check the agenda out. Don’t hesitate to register now.

Busy next few days: Sun Systems Tour in Jakarta, Indonesia on November 5, then MyGOSSCON 2008 on November 6.

For the Sun event, there’s a corporate slide deck – MySQL from Sun: The Platform for the Web Economy. For the MyGOSSCON event I’ll be speaking about MySQL Best Practices.

If you’re in Jakarta and free on November 5, don’t hesitate to say hi. Similar invite for MyGOSSCON, though I don’t actually know if its open to all.

Within the APAC region? Planning to attend foss.my (November 8-9 2008)? Why not stay a little longer, for the MySQL for Developers training course – 5 days, from 10-14 November 2008, conducted by my good friends at hSenid (MySQL partners in Malaysia). To register, or find out more, drop Ruchith a quick email at ruchith[at]hsenid[dot]com.

So, you want to compile Workbench for Linux, on Fedora 9. You need to install the following packages:

autoconf automake libtool libzip-devel libxml2-devel libsigc++20-devel libglade2-devel gtkmm24-devel mesa-libGLU-devel mysql-libs mysql mysql-devel uuid-devel lua-devel glitz-devel glitz-glx-devel pixman-devel pcre-devel libgnome-devel gtk+-devel pango-devel cairo

I feel I’m being too liberal with dependencies, but I’m not about to strip it, I just want to get it working first :)

You need to have ctemplate and ctemplate-devel installed from updates-testing-newkey (relevant koji build log).

By default, configure.in in Workbench looks for “google-ctemplate”, as opposed to just “ctemplate” as Fedora calls it. You can fix this (easy), or “cheat” – in /usr/local/include you can do sudo ln -s /usr/include/ctemplate google. Take your pick.

Now for the fun. Fedora includes gcc-4.3. Ubuntu ships gcc-4.2. Let’s just say gcc-4.3 got stricter (its C++ header dependency streamlining related). So strict, they have a useful porting to gcc-4.3 guide. Just FYI, I believe OpenSUSE is also shipping a more modern GCC (I expect the next Ubuntu release in the coming month to do the same).

So, start getting used to doing the following in files that lead the compiler to fail:

• #include <cstring>
• #include <algorithm>
• #include <memory>
• #include <climits>
• #include <cstdlib>

This will help get rid of error messages like: error: 'memset' was not declared in this scope. This stuff is already fixed in trunk (or the patch is being applied).

You will need to pick up cairo from source. Why? Because --enable-glitz isn’t on by default in the RPM spec file (similar with Ubuntu). The glitz backend is apparently still a release preview and doesn’t fully work yet. (I have spoken to Alfredo, and he says he’s just removed the requirement on glitz in trunk).

Now, once you’ve built cairo with glitz, before running ./autogen.sh, do: export PKGCONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig. Then go ahead and make it.

There are still plenty of warnings that spew by. I have this vague idea that once Workbench for Linux sits on Launchpad, we’ll run a janitorial tree that fixes warnings in the code. A great way to garner community contributions!

Anyway, a lot of this is either fixed or patches will be applied to trunk. I expect a mysql-workbench-5.1.2-alpha out sooner than you think to eclipse 5.1.1-alpha. Again, superb work Alfredo (and MikeZ and the rest of the GUI team).

I had the pleasure of sitting right across the MySQL GUI Tools Team, and decided to try my hand at Workbench (Workbench for Linux, that is). Congratulations to the entire team for the great work! I am excited.

First up, the things you need on Ubuntu 8.04 (I created a fresh install, and installed all the updates), if you’re downloading the binary:

• liblua5.1-0
• libglitz1
• libzip1
• libmysqlclient15off
• mysql-common
• libglitz-glx1

Workbench on Linux

It works. It starts up. Its exciting. Of course, when I try to edit a table name or even create a table, it fails by segmentation fault. Segfaults are annoying… so the best way to debug it, is of course to run catchsegv. After running catchsegv ./mysql-workbench 2>&1 >crashlog, I sent it over to Alfredo for him to debug.

Of course, as luck would have it, the build ships stripped binaries, so the segfaults can’t be debugged. Grr. Nevermind, I decided its time to build it (warm thanks to the Workbench team for staying around till like 7.30pm at the meeting room). As a consequence, Alfredo managed to also update the Linux Build Instructions page as we had learned some things along the way.

I built glitz, pixman and cairo from freedekstop.org (when building cairo, remember to do it as such: ./configure --enable-glitz), but from what I gather, this is now available via Ubuntu 8.04 and is sufficient. So the build dependencies are all in Ubuntu, which is useful (in terms of building a shippable DEB). The only thing that isn’t available in a packaged form is Google’s ctemplate library. I notice the instructions now don’t mention installing a few more packages I installed on Ubuntu (I’m not even sure now if they’re a hard dependency or not, I’ll check later). But if something fails, install libproc-dev libXtst-dev libdnet libdnet-dev.

Like magic, I can now edit and create tables, draw them even. No crashes, its pretty stable for an alpha release (provided you’re using a version you build!). I expect a healthy continuos release cycle, so if you encounter a bug today, it might be fixed before you know it… Of course, this doesn’t discount you from being good friends with our bugs system at http://bugs.mysql.com/.

My short term plan to assist Workbench on Linux:

• Get it building on Fedora
• There’s a patch floating around for OpenSUSE, get it building there too
• Package DEBs and RPMs
• Try to include missing packages (like google-ctemplate) upstream

Oh, if you have issues, hop on to IRC on freenode, and join #workbench. Sure, there won’t be great answers in the next week or so (while we’re all busy at the developers meeting), but usually there’s always someone awake on that channel.