Sounds like their package has the very bare minimum to get you up and running.
For comparison, the MySQL 5.5
mysqld and
mysql binaries I compiled yesterday are about 65 MB between the two of them, and the whole
bin directory is close to 200. The whole installation directory is about 350 MB uncompressed, of which about 100 MB is the test suite. I made a tarball of the installation directory, then removed the
mysql-test directory from it--the tarball is still about 65 MB. While our release binaries are likely smaller than mine (since our Release Engineering folks know heaps more about that sort of thing than I do), it's still going to be in the same ballpark.
So I'd have to say that I'm a bit sceptical.
I see that the source tarballs are only about 20MB. You could download that, compile your own, and have everything you'd get in the big download. :)
cheers
jon.
Jon Stephens
MySQL Documentation Team @ Oracle
MySQL Dev Zone
MySQL Server Documentation
Oracle