Excerpts from David McMackins's message of 2015-02-10 14:35:38 -0800: > In the course of developing a library which heavily relies on > libmysqlclient, I've noticed several issues using MariaDB on Debian > lately. I'm worried about its future. > > The latest version of libmariadb in Debian no longer works as a drop-in > replacement for MySQL. The library's name and include path has changed > from mysql to mariadb. While I don't have a problem with someone trying > to use their own name, it means that build scripts relying on > mysql_config and code looking for mysql/mysql.h will break with the new > version. Because of this, I'm considering dropping support in my > software for MariaDB, since they have moved away from their original > purpose. > > Can I depend on the future of MySQL in Debian, or will it be phased out > in the foreseeable future? > Hi David. First and foremost, as much as the MariaDB team has talked about remaining a drop-in replacement, both the server and the client library introduce incompatible features that mean that replacement is a one-way street. For the server, they have engines and on-disk formats that differ from MySQL. For their forked libmysqlclient, they add symbols which don't exist in libmysqlclient, thus a program linked against MariaDB's libmysqlclient may not function with the original libmysqlclient. For that reason, we forced it to be renamed to libmariadbclient (upstream has declined to acknowledge this poisoning of the namespace). It's best to just treat them as two forks, with forked communities. That said, there is an umbrella team, pkg-mysql-maint, that works together to make sure neither one steps on the others' toes. The team also helps with Percona XtraDB Cluster server which includes Galera support. As far as their futures in Debian, there is hope for having both. Oracle has been helpful in assisting Debian and Ubuntu developers in maintaining MySQL packaging in Debian and Ubuntu. Meanwhile Otto Kekäläinen has done a fabulous job at maintaining MariaDB. Percona employees have done their part as well in making sure their tools are included in Debian. So, my recommendation for your issue is to just build-depend on libmysqlclient-dev. It's not going anywhere as long as Oracle keeps showing up to make sure it works. And you'll get binaries that work fine against mariadb-server or mysql-server or percona-xtradb-cluster-server.
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