I have been trying for hours and hours to install MySQL ODBC connector on Mac OS 10.7 Lion
The instructions tell me that I can download a binary version of the connector as a tarball:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/connector-odbc-installation-binary-macosx.html
Unhelpfully, this doesn't actually tell you where you can get this version, and in fact the answer seems to be (from a lot of Google searches): NOWHERE. Only source versions are available.
So, download the source. But the instructions for building this are clearly for a rather ancient version of libmyodbc3-3.51, and when I follow them (or try to), it turns out that my Xcode install is too NEW for me to build.
So, I would rather download and build the newer 5.1.x (5.1.9 currently). This doesn't come with a configure script - you have to generate one using autoconf. Or you can use autoreconf, but you still have to do aclocal and automake --add-missing and "glibtoolize" (at least, it sort of worked for me, maybe it should be "libtoolize"?).
The instructions given have you doing gcc by hand! What's with the make file??
Anyway, they don't quite work work for 5.1.9, there are missing refs. At least, I managed to get it to build and link by adding -lmysqld to the list for gcc (and various other arguments specific to my installation).
Did it work? How should I know - it built, after many hours of work, and I was able to add it using Mac OS ODBC administrator. But it didn't actually connect to the database. Very hard to debug!! I've no idea whether the problem is with the build, the source, the installation, the ODBC manager, or the client program (Filemaker, which is why I wanted ODBC in the first place). Unfortunately, the ODBC so-called tracing seems to work on and off, and not when I am actually trying to connect.
DOes it really have to be this hard? WHy oh why can't someone at MySQL either upload an installable binary which is actually available, OR, if that's not possible for some reason, update the instructions so that it's possible to actually follow them without having to hack makefiles or make guesses about which libraries to use? I really NEED to use Filemaker with MySQL on Mac Os - and it's completely impossible, as things stand.