How to Install MySQLdb on Solaris

[Jeff Clough]

Maybe I'm the only one having this trouble, but just in case, here's what I ended up having to do:

After extracting the tarball, change to that directory and run "python setup.py build" (as usual). This builds a _mysql.so file that can't find its mysqlclient library. So rebuild this file by hand. In my particular instance, setup.py used the command:

cc -G build/temp.solaris-2.9-sun4u-2.4/_mysql.o \
-L/usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql -lmysqlclient \
-lz -lposix4 -lgen -lsocket -lnsl -lm \
-o build/lib.solaris-2.9-sun4u-2.4/_mysql.so

So I added the -R option below:

cc -G build/temp.solaris-2.9-sun4u-2.4/_mysql.o \
-R/usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql -L/usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql -lmysqlclient \
-lz -lposix4 -lgen -lsocket -lnsl -lm \
-o build/lib.solaris-2.9-sun4u-2.4/_mysql.so

The usual "python setup.py install" as root command does something completely funky with egg files. To install MySQLdb as an ordinary Python module, become root and do this

cd build/lib.solaris-2.9-sun4u-2.4
chown -R root:root *
chmod -R o+rX *
mv * /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages

Of course, you'll have to adjust those paths to ones that fit your situation, but this leaves MySQLdb installed and ready to import into your Python scripts. If anyone has a better method, I'd love to hear about it. (And the egg thing. Why do we suddenly need egg files for this?)