In version 3.0002_4 of the DBD::mysql module, support for version 4.1 of MySQL has been broken. Probably not intentionally, but definitely broken. See, in version 5 of MySQL, the MySQL folks added a new type – ‘bit’. 3.0002_4 accounts for this, but doesn’t account for it cleanly – if you don’t have version 5 of MySQL installed, the install breaks with wonderful errors that look like:

dbdimp.c: In function `mysql_to_perl_type':
dbdimp.c:249: error: `MYSQL_TYPE_BIT' undeclared (first use in this function)
dbdimp.c:249: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
dbdimp.c:249: error: for each function it appears in.)
dbdimp.c:259: error: `MYSQL_TYPE_VARCHAR' undeclared (first use in this function)
dbdimp.c:263:25: warning: extra tokens at end of #ifdef directive


Downgrading to 3.0002 sorts it all out, and in fairness, after checking CPAN I found that _4 is flagged as ‘developer edition’ – in other words, it will break. Hit cpan2rpm over the head and life is good. In other news, that type_bit error actually only had 1 hit on Google. Amazing.