How to remove already installed MySQL and re-install from source

Question

It was installed by rpm. But need to install from source to add new features to it.

Answer 1

Don't get yourself into the unmaintainable mess that is a package-based server with loads of stuff installed from sources on it. The best approach for preserving your sanity is to get the SRPM for MySQL and build a newer version with your own modifications, then store your resulting SRPM and RPMs so that you can redeploy them elsewhere easily.

Answer 2

rpm -qa | grep mysql | xargs exho rpm -e

I used rpm and not yum/urpmi/apt-get/smart since you did not say which RPM based distro are you using.

Now to the real question: what feature of mysql you need and is missing? Something smells funny in your question.

PS: Please remove the echo after the "xargs" in the command after you are you that this is what you want to do.

Answer 3

I routinely install things from source and never use SRPMs, but I always make very sure never to install in the same places where the RPMs install things. (/usr/local was intended for that; a ./configure script is usually preconfigured to install things there, but if software comes something else, e.g. just a Makefile, be wary and check. Best to create a special user 'local' who owns /usr/local, and do all your installation from source as local instead of as root, that way you'll get permission errors if the installation process tries to write to places you want it to stay away from).

Answer 4

rpm -qa | grep -i mysql

yum remove mysql*

then you can install tar etc.