pdksh quirk perhaps: "set - x y z" leaves the "-" as $1 (and there's no reason to have it here).

Ftr, there is at least a theoretical reason and the better fix would have been replacing the single with a double dash.

That "heh" has me hanging off a cliff.

Keep holding on!

Actually, there was already some libedit drama at this stage of the tale, just getting it to build, that I missed. First it had some shell script generated code thing that misfired; here was my patch from the time in full:

pdksh quirk perhaps: "set - x y z" leaves the "-" as $1 (and there's no reason to have it here).

Caused headers to be generated with broken, colliding ifdef guards.

 -jfw

--- a/cmd-line-utils/libedit/makelist.sh
+++ b/cmd-line-utils/libedit/makelist.sh
@@ -62,7 +62,7 @@
     ;;

 -h)
-    set - `echo $FILES | sed -e 's/\\./_/g'`
+    set `echo $FILES | sed -e 's/\\./_/g'`
     hdr="_h_`basename $1`"
     cat $FILES | $AWK '
 	BEGIN {

Then in libedit/chartype.h there was some ifdef madness for unicode detection that deliberately bombed because it didn't know about musl, the fix being to delete it on the assumption that indeed musl uses unicode for its "wide characters" rather than "some other funky encoding"; the offending part:

/* Ideally we should also test the value of the define to see if it
 * supports non-BMP code points without requiring UTF-16, but nothing
 * seems to actually advertise this properly, despite Unicode 3.1 having
 * been around since 2001... */

/* XXXMYSQL : Added FreeBSD & AIX to bypass this check.
  TODO : Verify if FreeBSD & AIX stores ISO 10646 in wchar_t. */
#if !defined(__NetBSD__) && !defined(__sun) \
  && !(defined(__APPLE__) && defined(__MACH__)) \
  && !defined(__FreeBSD__) && !defined(_AIX)
#ifndef __STDC_ISO_10646__
/* In many places it is assumed that the first 127 code points are ASCII
 * compatible, so ensure wchar_t indeed does ISO 10646 and not some other
 * funky encoding that could break us in weird and wonderful ways. */
	#error wchar_t must store ISO 10646 characters
#endif
#endif

The sarcasm will be contained to the title for this one.

Cooler read, but just as informative.

Having bigger fish to fry, I took a note and let it proceed with the bundled one, figuring that would at least be the one most tested and likely to work (heh).

Alright. That "heh" has me hanging off a cliff.

Memcached being a whole separate thing that we're not currently interested in - nor do I anticipate that we'd likely ever be - I happily struck it from the CMakeLists and scripted the full removal of its code just to be sure. This has turned out fine so far.

Alright, sounds fine.

Thus all that was needed was to change the offending line to check for 2 instead of 1. I suppose deleting the check altogether would have worked just as well, but taken things out of "sed one-liner" territory and I wasn't inclined to do some more thorough patch at such an early stage.

So at the moment I can't use my system zlib; I may end up updating it to the latest once I can take a proper look at it. Since bumping the MySQL version to 5.6.45 at least I won't have the known-bad bundled compressBound() in play.

Alright for now, like you said, bigger fish to fry.