The Old Monk

As part of a cleanup of someone's notebook, I created a non-admin account and copied the docs/shortcuts. Thankfully, the data was already in a separate drive. Trouble is, the non-admin user would see all of it as read-only.

I tried changing the perms on the content (via the gui as well as via attrib.exe), but the non-admin user still wasn't able to write.

It turned out that the issue was file ownership. I'm not too sure what the patchlevel of the XP system was, but a right click -> properties menu didn't bring up any tab where I could see or change file ownership.

The solution: download and install Cygwin, and then a simple "chown -R <NonAdminUser> /cygdrive/<driveletter>/*".

Reinforces my opinion that one really *needs* cygwin to make Windows usable!

Building the mysql-server Ubuntu package (mysql-dfsg-5.0_5.0.51a-3ubuntu5) on hardy has some issues, even without the Sphinx patches.

• The SSL cert used in the tests is expired, failing a bunch of tests with a SSL error (LP: #323755).
• Some MySQL status and error messages have changed, making some tests fail. (This is not true - see update for details).
• Upstream has a debian directory which isn't integrated and causes build failures. (There's a dpatch for this already, but it doesn't go all the way).
• Sphinx provides a SphinxSE patch for MySQL 0.37
• The debian/rules script skips out on the pre-build automake invocation, and the sphinx patches never make it to the build, or the compilation fails midway.

I managed to get these issues sorted out via a series of dpatches. You can download the debdiff and build the package yourself:

$ apt-get source mysql-server
 .... [will download the source and apply the diffgz etc] ....

$ cd mysql-dfsg-5.0-5.0.1a
$ patch -p1 < /path/to/mysql-dfsg-5.0_5.0.51a-3ubuntu5-sphinx1.debdiff
.... [messages about files patched] ....

$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc
.... [builds and unsigned package. Takes *really* long] ....

update: It turns out that the MySQL error messages didn't change after all. I should have noticed earlier, but the difference in error messages is because the build machine was using OpenDNS, which wasn't returning a NXDOMAIN for invalid/nonexistent hosts. The debdiff is now fixed and the unnecessary dpatch has been removed. But the thing to learn from this is that if your build machine is using OpenDNS in its default configuration (it's possible to fix OpenDNS' behaviour) - the MySQL test suite *WILL FAIL*.