I just upgraded my MySQL server from 5.0.7 to 5.0.10. I wanted to make a few notes about what I did to set it up.
1. I compiled MySQL 5.0.10-beta.
./configure --prefix=/var/mysql5010 --with-unix-socket-path=/tmp/mysql5.sock --with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static --enable-assembler --with-low-memory --with-named-curses-libs=/lib/libncurses.so.5 --with-mysqld-user=mysql
2. Did a make && make install
3. Stop mysql507 (on my server I created a script to stop and start mysql and mysql5, this way I can easily run both servers at the same time) stopmysql5
4. mkdir /var/mysql5010/var
5. cp -Rv /var/mysql507/var/* /var/mysql5010/var
6. Chmod -Rv mysql.mysql /var/mysql5010
7. Updated the startmysql5 script to point to the new path (var/mysql5010), same with stopmysql5 script.
8. startmysql5
And I was running! Now, this might not work on future versions, particularly since MySQL 5.x is in beta right now.
I did not recompile MySQLdb yet, as it is working fine for me, however it might be wise. In fact, I really should do that because the libraries are pointing to the /var/mysql507 directory.
Edit: 10/25/05
The config options here are for a smaller/slower server. Use this for normal servers with decent amount of RAM:
./configure --prefix=/var/mysql --with-unix-socket-path=/tmp/mysql.sock --with-mysqld-ldflags=-all-static --enable-assembler --with-named-curses-libs=/lib/libncurses.so.5 --with-mysqld-user=mysql --enable-thread-safe-client
This also enables the Thread Safe client, which will work better with mysql-python modules.