A C application needs to be compiled remotely on a RHEL server. It has a working MySQL installation (can be accessed from a terminal and by the web server), though 'rpm -qi mysql' and 'rpm -qi mysql-devel' do report that these items are not installed. I have no specific information about the server setup, so I can't tell if MySQL has been compiled from source or has been added by other means.

To compile the C application I need mysql-devel installed. Running 'yum install mysql-devel' gave no results (probably a repository issue, though I want not to mess up with repo settings). Running "up2date -u mysql-devel" installed mysql-devel 4.1.20 3.RHEL4.1.el4_6.1 i386 from one of the CentOS4 repo's. However, compilation still fails due MySQL issues.

I don't want to break the server or changing/updating MySQL itself before gathering some reasonable infos.

So far I have been using Red Hat since version 5.2 up until 7.3, and later switched to Fedora, which I'm using up to this day. I have obviously no hands-on experience with RHEL (the remote system runs 2.6.9-67.0.15.EL).

The source code itself compiles fine on a Fedora system, with all relevant packages installed/updated by yum.

All response is appreciated.

Sincerely,
CSIG

Dealing with other peoples left overs can be a real pain. What I have seen happen is people have an older version of an app installed via rpm and then (without removing the rpm) compile a different (usually newer version) of the same app on the system. Since rpm only knows about stuff installed via rpm it installs new packages (-devel) based upon the older rpm version rather than the compiled version.(up2date, yum, smart, etc are just front ends for rpm).

Assuming a standard RHEL4 install, it should not have yum installed(RHEL did not switch to yum until V5). If it does have yum, then again you are dealing with someone else's left over mess. Generally (hopefully) RHEL4 systems use Centos' yum and repos (which is fine), but there are other versions running around.

The other issue you could be dealing with is that you apps dependencies are newer than the versions supported by RHEL4. Remember RHEL is based on Fedora. Once a RHEL version is released they do not generally upgrade major revision of the software, ie RHEL5.0 still runs FF 1.5 (security patches are still made for it). RHEL5 was based on FC6 and I THINK RHEL4 was based on FC3, so if you are comparing compiling on F8 to RHEL4 you MAY be comparing apples and oranges.

All that being said no one is really going to be able to help you until you post the EXACT error messages given on the failure.

Thanks for your detailed response. Just a few follow-up notes how the situation was solved.

The server in question is a dedicated server hosted by HostGator. In the end I had to post a ticket to their Technical Support. This caused some delay, but in the end they installed mysql-devel stuff (I have to say that their Tech Support actually is fine and prompt).

I have no details about how they did it or what their concept is for installing/upgrading. They are obviously not using any of the common package managers, at least not for all packages. Given the amount of customers they handle I guess they have set up some custom procedure for installing some critical parts of systems. I assume MySQL can be considered critical. Some other packages that I needed, like ghostscript, were installed via rpm or yum. It was just confusing to find some packages represented in the RPM database and other ones not.

So mysql-devel has been installed, from that point on compilation worked fine, as the problems were due to unavailable mysql headers.

I didn't had to deal very intensely with that RHEL system, but was actually surprised that even on a Terminal it felt a bit more different from a Fedora system then I expected.