Nevertheless i decided to atleast try and see if i would be able to build it and maybe change something, run some tests. As I am a Windows user i found out the only way for me to build Drizzle is through Cygwin. I started with installing the latest stable version of Cygwin 1.5.25-15. I must say that their installer is really nice but i would offer to add a package search feature. Might help when you want to install numerous packages.

So what’s next? I found this wiki page about building drizzle and figured first thing i should do is get Bazaar. I installed the following packages using Cygwin installer:

• bison
• bzr
• gettext
• readline
• libpcre0
• pcre
• pcre-devel
• libtoolize
• gperf
• e2fsprogs

And then went on to get the Drizzle sources:

mkdir ~/bzrwork
bzr init-repo ~/bzrwork
cd ~/bzrwork
bzr branch lp:drizzle

Now onto building. Here’s where all the fun begins.

Drizzle requires a tool named libevent which is not available through Cygwin installer and you must build it yourself. And still you can’t build libevent with the latest version of Cygwin because it lacks certain functionality. After some googling i found a patched IPV6 version of Cygwin that fixes these issues. Added the #define EAI_SYSTEM 11 to http.c and finally were able to ./configure && make && make install libevent.

You also need protobuf installed. And there’s no package for that either. Actually this protobuf is quite nice stuff. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

Now that we seem to have all the packages installed we can start building drizzle. It should be as easy as this:

cd drizzle
./config/autorun.sh
./configure
make
make install

It is not. First to be able to compile Drizzle you need to have gcc4. And even if you do, ./configure must need to know where it is. So we need to use additional flags CC and CXX. Then you need to show ./configure where libevent is installed by adding a flag –with-libevent-prefix=/usr/local or any other place you have it in. I also found a really ugly problem with warnings. I wasn’t able to compile drizzle because it stopped somwhere in gnulib complaining about some warnings that were treated as errors. Funny enough there is a sarcastic option to disable these warnings: –disable-pedantic-warnings. You also probably want to install Drizzle somwhere else than usual by using:  –prefix=/some/deploy/dir.

In the end you come up with something like this: 

./configure CC=gcc-4 CXX=g++-4 –with-libevent-prefix=/usr/local –disable-pedantic-warnings –prefix=/some/deploy/dir

That’s how far i’ve got with it. Though i’m still not able to compile it.  I get an error somwhere in mystrings library that is related to some datatype casting issues. Hopefully i’ll be able to hack through this

Notice that this is a simple CMD like window but it now has some nice colors and new shiny tools.Now in order to make it even more cool you need a tool named PuTTYcyg. PuTTYcyg is a patched version of PuTTY that, in addition to telnet, rlogin, ssh, and serial connections, can also be used as a local Cygwin terminal instead of the Windows console. Download the package and unzip it somwhere. I put it in C:\Program Files\puttycyg. Now double click on a file named putty.exe. Now fill everything as in the image bellow and press save.

Now make a shortcut of this putty.exe on your Desktop. And change it’s properties like this:

Click apply and you are ready to go myfriend! Double click on the shortcut and you should be able to do thins like this including full screen resize yay!

Now .. Begone CMD!