The Wonsys Blog

A few days ago, I reinitialized my MacBook Pro — I’d played too much with it ;) — so I had to reinstall the whole system.

I started with my must have applications like Textmate, Firefox, SpamSieve, iTerm, NetNewsWire, followed by others I need to develop — Ruby, Rails and MySQL. Installing the latter on my home machines had always caused me trouble in the past, no matter if I was on Windows, Linux or OS X, and this time was no different.

This time the problem was the nothing to install alert using the official package version (.pkg) downloaded from the site.
Basically, I double-clicked on the .pkg archive, installer starts, all run smoothly, until I accept the license: at that moment the (behated) alert appears: nothing to install!
It happens when you’ve already installed a more recent version of MySQL — or if you’ve deleted it using sudo rm -r /usr/local/mysql* — and you try to install an older version. In my case, I had 5.0 and wanted 4.1.

I tried googling for a solution with no luck, even though I found a lot of people experiencing the same issue.
So I had to scratch my had and try to fix it by myself.

The fix is actually simpler than you can imagine: Mac OS X maintains a copy — actually a receipt — of what you install from packages and this is what caused the alert to be shown.
Indeed, if you delete the package /Library/Receipt/Mysql*pkg and relaunch the installation using the downloaded pkg, everything will work as expected!

I hope this post will save some time to those experiencing the same issue.

P.S.
Keep in mind it simply worked for me and even though I hope it does the same for you, I take no responsibility for the outcome. ;)

This post was written by Simone D. 1 year, 3 months ago on May 29th, 2007 evening time.