DBD::mysql and Windows

[Daniël van Eeden]

Hi All,

In the last few years I've been trying a few times to get the latest 
versions of DBD::mysql fully working on Microsoft Windows, however it 
now looks like Ive hit a dead end.

DBD::mysql requires MySQL 8.0 (released in 2018) or newer. Strawberry 
Perl was shipping with a libmysqlclient from MySQL 5.7 (which is now 
EOL). Newer versions don't seem to include a libmysqlclient at all. When 
combining a recent version of Strawberry Perl with a MySQL downloaded 
from mysql.com things work until you try to use SSL/TLS as both MySQL 
and Perl include OpenSSL, but with different versions.

I think DBD::mysql would work fine on Windows if both Perl and MySQL are 
compiled with the same compiler and OpenSSL version. But compiling from 
source isn't common on Windows and it looks like MySQL on Windows might 
not support compiling with GCC.

While I haven't tested this, I think WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) 
might be an alternative for running MySQL and Perl on a Windows machine. 
But as I don't use Windows myself I don't know if this is an acceptable 
workaround.

More info on this:

- 
https://github.com/perl5-dbi/DBD-mysql/pull/384#issuecomment-2548585132

For anyone with the right permissions on github.com/perl5-dbi, I think 
it would be good to disable/remove appveyor for DBD-mysql as that now 
always results in failing checks for PRs and there isn't any short (or 
medium) term fix for this.

I anyone has a good suggestion about how to move forward, please let me 
know.

Daniël