First, what's wrong with just using the Windows version? It works fine.
Then, I've wanted to do the same thing as you, and it can be done. Note that I haven't attempted to build the server; all I was interested in was the MySQL client library so I could do some simple client development in the Cygwin environment.
So what do you have to do in order to build the client library on Cygwin?
First, get the tarball. I used mysql-5.5.13.tar.gz
. Unpack it in a suitable location, like /usr/local/src
.
Then, install the CMake
build system via the Cygwin installer. MySQL has switched from GNU Autotools to CMake. CMake is a meta-build system. It generates Makefiles and other build scripts for specific build environments.
Of course, you also need make
and gcc
.
I had to apply an innocuous little patch posted on the MySQL forum by one Hiroaki Kawai in order to get the stuff to compile:
Finally, I renamed all dtoa() to _dtoa() in mysql/strings/dtoa.c.
The function is static, and should be safe to be renamed.
You can patch using Perl:
perl -pi.orig -e 's/\bdtoa\b/_dtoa/g' strings/dtoa.c
Then, in the top source directory, type:
cmake .
make mysqlclient
You'll get two static libraries in libmysql/
, libclientlib.a
and libmysqlclient.a
. I don't know that the former is (possibly just a build artefact), but the latter is the real thing.
cp /usr/local/src/mysql-5.5/libmysql/libmysqlclient.a /usr/local/lib/
But it's static, and you likely want a dynamic library. This is where the Cygwin docs come in handy. So:
module=mysqlclient
gcc -shared -o cyg${module}.dll \
-Wl,--out-implib=lib${module}.dll.a \
-Wl,--export-all-symbols \
-Wl,--enable-auto-import \
-Wl,--whole-archive lib${module}.a \
-Wl,--no-whole-archive -lz
That'll create the shared library cygmysqlclient.dll
and the import library libmysqlclient.dll.a
. Copy both to /usr/local/bin
. And that's it.
Here's another question on building the MySQL client library on Cygwin.