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Here is a quick guide to getting MySQL installed on Debian Etch without pulling
in anything from testing or unstable.

Now there are a number of different ways you could do this but I wanted a debian
package (as I have banned installing anything from source on new servers at work).

After some google action I found that Norbert Tretkowski had submitted packages to experimental
However after checking these out they wanted to pull things in from testing and/or unstable and I didn't want
that (especially considering it wanted to upgrade libc6)

That said it turned out that this package would build fine on Etch by doing the following:

Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free


Then create /etc/apt/preferences with the following in:

Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

which basically says "only install stuff from stable".

Next we get the dev tools and the build dependencies:

aptitude install dpkg-dev devscripts
apt-get build-dep mysql-server-5.1
apt-get source mysql-server-5.1


Then build the .debs:

cd mysql-dfsg-5.1-5.1.24rc
debuild


Once that has finished get the run time deps:

aptitude install libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl


And finally install the .debs we created earlier:

cd ..
dpkg -i *.deb


...and there you go, MySQL 5.1 on Debian Etch :)