Jim McAtee wrote:

Hi Jim,

I don't speak for the company on this, and perhaps someone else may correct me or have more to offer than I do, but there's not even been a 3.23 maintenance release in over a year, and 4.0 has been considered suitable for production since March of 2003. Given the amount of change that's taken place in MySQL since then, that's practically an eternity. Non-commercial users should have upgraded by now. Those whose have business needs for continuing to use outdated products can either do their own bugfixes or buy support from MySQL AB.

As for MyCC, you said it yourself -- it's abandoned. To the best of my knowledge, no further time or effort is being invested in development or testing of it, nor will there be. My understanding is that -- again, just as you say -- there were too many bugs and unexpected behaviours in it. I've also been told that the MyCC codebase had grown too unwieldy and that, rather than try to overhaul it, the decision was made to start fresh. Of course, the Control Centre source code is still available, and anyone is welcome to continue development on their own (so long as they comply with the terms of the license, of course).

This phenonmenon is hardly unique to MySQL -- it's true of most Open Source products and projects. For example, some people may still be running their websites on PHP 3, but they're pretty much on their own if they do so. They can't expect much help from the PHP developers, who've moved on to developing PHP 5 and perhaps providing some additional PHP 4 mainentance releases in the interim.

I'm sorry if you don't find that a satisfactory answer, but so far as I can see, that's just how it is.

IMO, any hassles one might encounter in upgrading are well worth it, given the improvements in both MySQL itself, and the new GUI tools vis à vis MyCC.

cheers

jon.