I took this picture at
Hamburg Airport while waiting for
Kaj to arrive for our meeting last week. I was browsing through the magazines in a news shop in the arrival area and was pretty impressed about the amount of available magazines about Linux and Open Source Software. It amazes me how they all manage to produce enough content to fill a magazine on a frequent basis. I take this as a very positive sign - Linux has become a mainstream OS. I wonder how many people consider switching to Linux instead of going with MS Vista - the numerous CDs/DVDs that are included in these magazines significantly reduce the acceptance threshold for new users. Live CDs make it easy to give Linux a try without having to touch the installed operating system. The support and automatic detection and configuration of hardware in Linux has become much better nowadays, too. Granted, there is still a lot of room for improvement (especially when it comes to video card and WLAN chipset support, it seems) - but Linux distributions have reached a level of maturity that make them a viable alternative to Mac OS X or MS Vista for the most common use cases. And all the required applications are already included out of the box and are free (as in beer)! So what is missing to world domination?
So far, the MySQL Server RPM packages as provided by MySQL AB used to automatically start the mysqld process after the package has been installed. It has been like that since the very beginning and we think of it as a convenience for our users when they want to get up and running quickly.
However, Kristian raised an interesting point in BUG#27072 where he points out that automatically starting mysqld during the RPM installation might not always be the desired behaviour, especially in automatic installation environments or during a fresh installation (where the system might not be fully configured yet). Therefore he proposes to change this behaviour to not start mysqld as part of the installation.
While I personally agree with his proposal, this is of course a tricky decision: our users are familiar with this behaviour and it's never a good idea to cause surprises. Therefore this change could only be done in future versions of MySQL, where they can be properly announced and documented and don't cause too much confusion.
Then again, there are several options here. Should we just disable it for the Enterprise Linux RPMs (RHEL/SLES) and keep it enabled in the "generic" RPMs? This would be inconsistent and harder to document/explain. Should the server never be started at all, or should we keep the behaviour for updates at least (when the server was already running before the package update)?
We would like to get your take on this. Please post your comments and suggestions to the bug report (preferred) or leave a comment on my blog, so we can get an impression on what you would expect to be the correct behaviour here. Thanks!
I just stumbled over Sebastian's blog entry:
The second Free and Open Source Conference "FrOSCon" takes place on August, 25th and 26th 2007 in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, Germany. The conference is once again hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin.
I attended FrOSCon last year and found it a very pleasant conference to be at. I gave two sessions about MySQL Backup and Security and the MySQL Business model, which both had a good audience and went quite well. I will definitely consider going there again this year, still pondering about the topics of my talks... The CfP ends on June, 4th, so make sure to turn in your suggestions in time!
If you are looking for a very well organized OSS event with lots of good technical content in a relaxed atmosphere, consider visting FrOSCon this year! I look forward to being there again.
