MySQL 5.5: CMake replaces autoconf/automake on all platforms, support for autotools has now been removed

There has been a lot of buzz about the MySQL 5.5 GA release and its new features and other user-visible improvements. In this blog post, I'd like to touch on a less noticeable, but still important change.

CMake has already been used to build the MySQL Server on Windows for a long time, while the GNU autotools were used on all other platforms. Since MySQL 5.5, all builds on all platforms are now performed using the same tool chain. With the latest release of MySQL 5.5, we've made an important step to clean up and simplify the MySQL build system: the support for autoconf/automake has now been removed completely. We've been performing the release builds of MySQL 5.5 using CMake exclusively for quite some time already. It became obvious that maintaining two separate build systems simply had become too much of a burden for our engineers, especially since the autotools-based builds were no longer exhaustively tested. This change was outlined in WorkLog#5665 - Removal of the autotools-based build system. We've made this step in close cooperation with our community of packagers (e.g. the maintainers of MySQL packages on the various Linux distributions).

By moving to CMake, we are giving our developers one common build mechanism for all platforms and there is a lot of new useful functionality such as out-of-source builds or a GUI for configuring the build options. And they can now build MySQL in the very same way that we do it for our own binaries! I've covered the advantages in my previous blog post about Building MySQL Server with CMake on Linux/Unix already. We've also created a general article about CMake and MySQL as well as an Autotools to CMake Transition Guide on the MySQL Forge Wiki. The description of the source build process in the reference manual has also been updated to reflect this change.

A big “thank you” should to go to Vladislav Vaintroub and Davi Arnaut for implementing and pushing the transition to CMake forward, and to Paul DuBois for creating and improving the documentation! Wearing my former build and release engineer hat, I am very happy about this change.

Other CMake-related articles that are worth reading:

• Giuseppe Maxia: Building MySQL 5.5 with CMake
• Jonathan Perkin: How To Build MySQL Releases
• Santo Leto: Step by Step Guide on How to Compile MySQL 5.5 on Microsoft Windows