Re: MySQL 5.5 EOL before Debian 8 LTS ends

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu@debian.org>]

On 03/01/2019 11:20, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> On 03/01/2019 10:40, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> to 3. tammik. 2019 klo 3.40 Robie Basak (robie.basak@canonical.com) kirjoitti:
>>>
>>> Hi Otto and the LTS team,
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 10:50:34AM +0200, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
>>>> I think that is *if* makes sense to engineer some automatic upgrade path in
>>>> an LTS release, then it would be to introduce MariaDB 10.1 into Jessie.
>>>
>>> If this is explicitly opted in to by users then I have no objection.
>>>
>>> However since the MySQL -> MariaDB crossgrade is not easily reversible
>>> (MariaDB modifies the on-disk schema/format), I don't think this is a
>>> good idea to do automatically. Users may, on upgrade past Jessie, choose
>>> to continue with MySQL coming from a source that isn't Debian stable
>>> (eg. by using unstable, directly from upstream, or a change of
>>> distribution). Automatically converting their database to not-MySQL
>>> would make that difficult, and would be a violation of the stable
>>> release promise for those users. I think that affected users would quite
>>> rightly be upset about it.
>>
>> You can always cross-migrate via logical database dumps as .sql files
>> instead of in-place binary files.
>>
>> Anyway the big question here is does the LTS team want to go through
>> the hassle of doing a version upgrade in a stable release.
> 
> The alternative to upgrading to MariaDB 10.1 is to keep supporting 10.0 for the
> lifetime of jessie. Obviously I'd prefer if we could do that for stability
> reasons, but I'm not sure we can commit to that without upstream's support.

Thinking about this some more, maybe we could attempt this, backporting security
fixes from MariaDB 10.1 or forward-porting them from MariaDB 5.5 (still
supported until April 2020). That way we don't force any 10.0 -> 10.1 migration
on our users (though MySQL 5.5 users will still have to migrate). This will be
more work than backporting new upstream releases, but if we limit ourselves to
security fixes and possibly some minor stability fixes, it may be feasible.

Cheers,
Emilio