Oracle 5.0 Reference Manual page 68

• rc indicates a Release Candidate. Release candidates are believed to be stable, having passed all of
MySQL's internal testing, and with all known fatal runtime bugs fixed. However, the release has not
been in widespread use long enough to know for sure that all bugs have been identified. Only minor
fixes are added. (A release candidate is what formerly was known as a gamma release.)
• If there is no suffix, it indicates that the release is a General Availability (GA) or Production release.
GA releases are stable, having successfully passed through all earlier release stages and are
believed to be reliable, free of serious bugs, and suitable for use in production systems. Only critical
bugfixes are applied to the release.
All releases of MySQL are run through our standard tests and benchmarks to ensure that they are
relatively safe to use. Because the standard tests are extended over time to check for all previously
found bugs, the test suite keeps getting better.
All releases have been tested at least with these tools:
• An internal test suite.
We run these tests for every server binary. See
information about this test suite.
• The MySQL benchmark suite.
determine whether the latest batch of optimizations actually made the code faster. See
"The MySQL Benchmark
We also perform additional integration and nonfunctional testing of the latest MySQL version in our
internal production environment. Integration testing is done with different connectors, storage engines,
replication modes, backup, partitioning, stored programs, and so forth in various combinations.
Additional nonfunctional testing is done in areas of performance, concurrency, stress, high volume,
upgrade and downgrade.
2.4.3.2. Choosing a Distribution Format
After choosing which version of MySQL to install, you should decide whether to use a binary
distribution or a source distribution. In most cases, you should probably use a binary distribution, if one
exists for your platform. Binary distributions are available in native format for many platforms, such as
RPM files for Linux or PKG package installers for Mac OS X or Solaris. Distributions also are available
as Zip archives or compressed
Reasons to choose a binary distribution include the following:
• Binary distributions generally are easier to install than source distributions.
• To satisfy different user requirements, we provide several servers in binary distributions.
is an optimized server that is a smaller, faster binary.
support.
Each of these servers is compiled from the same source distribution, though with different
configuration options. All native MySQL clients can connect to servers from either MySQL version.
Under some circumstances, you may be better off installing MySQL from a source distribution:
• You want to install MySQL at some explicit location. The standard binary distributions are ready
to run at any installation location, but you might require even more flexibility to place MySQL
components where you want.
• You want to configure
standard binary distributions. Here is a list of the most common extra options that you may want to
use to ensure feature availability:
•
--with-berkeley-db
•
--with-libwrap
Choosing Which MySQL Distribution to Install
The
mysql-test
This suite runs a range of common queries. It is also a test to
Suite".
files.
tar
to ensure that features are available that might not be included in the
mysqld
(not available on all platforms)
48
directory contains an extensive set of test cases.
Section 21.1.2, "The MySQL Test
mysqld-debug
Suite", for more
Section 8.1.3,
mysqld
is compiled with debugging