Over at the OPenARK blog Shlomi Noach argues that using apt-get or yum to install your MySQL instance will one day most likeley break your MySQL setup. Depdendencies, distros not shipping the MySQL version you want to use and on some distro's indeed the mysql vs MySQL issue, agreed, it all makes things less trivial.
However why give up a clean packaged system if there are other ways out ?
First of all by claiming that such an installation can break a working production environment looks to me like admitting you don't have a split development, production environment and that rather than testing stuff upfront indeed you just hack a long in production.
So rather than using a tarball for the MySQL instance an --force to satisfy the missing dependencies (hence also cluttering your system) , a much cleaner and less error prone setup is to only deploy from your own , self controlled repository , in which you only allow tested packages, most probably not the distro based package , hence packages that won't break your setups ;) But still you will be using apt or yum and deploying rpm's and debs , perfectly satisfying dependency needs.
Apart from that .. watch out for Banquise .. :) Coming to your favourite distro soon..
