Docs need vastly improving

[Michael Kilpatrick]

I'm going to be quite blunt and say that I've never had so many problems installing software as I have had with MsQSL. The upgrade process from 4.0.21 to 4.1.9 is fraught with problems, and yet the documentation is not that helpful. All you have to do is look at the enormous number of forum postings relating to the problem of updating and the errors such as:

#1251 mysql_connect():....does not support authentication protocol.....
#1043 - Access denied for user .....

The problem of having a "dead" MySQL service after removing V4.0 without properly removing the service first seems to be a real pain. And yet the documentation has really been updated to reflect the urgency of doing this correctly.

Further more the .chm helpfile is not indexed properly, it's just one long enormous page. That makes navigation a complete nightmare. For something as complicated as MySQL that makes it impossible for novices to find basic, essential information without having to wade through lots of things they don't understand yet.

There are many other problems associated with the upgrade. The PHP problem with "mbstring" is another example. Everything has gone from iso-8859 to utf-8, and phpMyAdmin complains about this. Everywhere on the internet just parrots the answer: "it's to do with the mbstring config". But nowhere can I see a detailed, concise list of all the mbstring commands I need to add to my config to make it work. It's not as though I'm the only person in the world using WinXP and just having upgraded to MySQL4.1.9 and phpMyAdmin2.6.1.

I really, really, am not impressed. My whole Sunday was spent trying to get MySQL running properly so that phpMyAdmin can access it. I'm starting all again as I type this. The installation notes for MysQL are vastly lacking in detail and troubleshooting help.

Michael