Re: Bug#732878: Add MariaDB as an alternative dependency
Excerpts from Philipp Kern's message of 2013-12-28 06:23:31 -0800:
> On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 06:36:44AM -0800, Clint Byrum wrote:
> > So we have forks. And forks suck. But that is how MySQL's little inbred
> > family works. And that is why I am pretty adamant that upstreams be
> > involved or I will not spend what little time I do have for Debian on
> > keeping their forks in Debian.
> […]
> > I'm not sure you can make a distributed database solution the same
> > as a browser, which does not need to directly share and serve data in
> > real time across nodes with other browsers as a primary function. The
> > reasons for these forks are not mostly political like libreoffice
> > vs. openoffice. There are deep technical differences that matter a lot
> > to the users and developers of each fork.
>
> OTOH every introduction of a new fork will increase the burden on us to
> support this "solution" for its technical differences. People will tell
> us that we cannot remove fork X because their data is all in the format
> of fork X. If they move away from being drop-in replacements, this
> will become quite annoying I think (e.g. eglibc is a drop-in
> replacement, egcs was basically a drop-in replacement, etc.).
>
Totally agree that once they go from drop-in replacements to full forks
the situation gets more urgent for one to dominate and thus kill off
the others. It seems to me that MariaDB 10 will force that situation,
as it may introduce on-disk incompatibility. When it does, then we will
have to get rid of some of the breaks/replaces relationships and move
data storage from /var/lib/mysql to /var/lib/mariadb.
To be clear, my point isn't to be anti-MariaDB or pro-MySQL. I am
pro-Debian-user. Debian users are not served if we push them onto MariaDB
when MySQL remains viable and its main code contributor (Oracle) remains
committed to helping maintain it in Debian. Likewise, some MariaDB users
have stepped up and thus it is also going to land in Debian. And Percona
is working hard on getting their packages ready for Debian as well.
So my point is, who are we to choose one if the authors and users of
others are excited to maintain the others?
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