Re: Bug#732878: Add MariaDB as an alternative dependency
Excerpts from Ben Hutchings's message of 2013-12-27 02:38:45 -0800:
> On Thu, 2013-12-26 at 17:42 -0800, Clint Byrum wrote:
> > Excerpts from Ben Hutchings's message of 2013-12-25 04:32:01 -0800:
> > > On Wed, 2013-12-25 at 03:41 -0800, Clint Byrum wrote:
> > > > Excerpts from Vincent Bernat's message of 2013-12-25 03:36:30 -0800:
> > > > > ❦ 25 décembre 2013 08:27 CET, Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> :
> > > > >
> > > > > > Don't you think it would be more reasonable if the mariadb-client
> > > > > > contained a Provides: mysql-client, rather than changing each and every
> > > > > > software dependency in Debian?
> > > > >
> > > > > Maybe MariaDB wants to be the "default" MySQL implementation?
> > > >
> > > > MariaDB is not MySQL, so this is not really what you mean. Also I'd ask
> > > > that you suggest why you think there should be a default, and why you
> > > > think that "MySQL" should not be the default "MySQL".
> > >
> > > Similarly,
> > >
> > > wodim is not cdrecord
> > > LibreOffice is not OpenOffice.org
> > > Iceweasel is not Firefox
> > > etc.
> > >
> > > so clearly we should never have implemented an automatic transition from
> > > one to the other...
> > >
> >
> > As far as I know, we are not planning any such automatic transition from
> > MySQL to MariaDB. They will both remain in Debian as long as there are
> > parties available to maintain them. Percona Server will also be arriving
> > soon, and now I see talk of Galera enabled MySQL variants as well.
>
> This strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. There will be four times the
> security issues to fix, more work for maintainers of dependent packages,
> and confusion for users.
>
I agree 100%. However, this was not Debian's idea, it was the MySQL
community's idea. The MySQL community tried to correct it with Drizzle,
a project I was involved with. MySQL was forked, cleaned up, and made
entirely modular so that folk wanting to do interesting things could
make plugins not forks. Drizzle, sadly, has largely stopped development,
IMO because it changed the SQL dialect making it hard to adopt.
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.
> > This is quite a bit different from those three desktop programs you
> > mentioned.
>
> Yes, but perhaps it should not be.
>
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.
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