Comment 16 for bug 375371

Hi Jamie, I did think of that, though I'm glad you brought it up as I should have mentioned it.

The build portion of a package must be runnable as a non-root user.

The whole point of using /var/tmp/mysql and not the user-tmp abstraction is that it is only accessible by the mysql user. So we can't mkdir or write files or anything as a non-root non-mysql user in that directory. We can't rely on any privilege elevation of any kind in the build step.

It shouldn't be hard to fix all of the affected builds. We might even want to provide a package just for testing that puts mysqld somewhere else.

The two places that I know of that run /usr/sbin/mysqld for their own tests (php5, and the version of libdbi-drivers in debian) run it as part of the build step.

Digging through the package listings, I only see two others that build-depend on mysql-server:

akonadi

and

digikam

I haven't reviewed their build process to see why they depend on mysql-server, but I think thats a reasonably sure way of knowing that those are the only packages affected.