Excerpts from Jonathan Aquilina's message of Tue Apr 24 23:07:10 -0700 2012:
I know I am not part of the team to make this final decision, but this
is how I feel about the situation.
This has a double edged sword given by the arguments below. A transition
is going to have to happen at some point, and I think the biggest thing
to consider is this. I had red some documentation, and 5.5 has had a
bunch of performance enhancements done to the InnoDB engine. Also from
some oracle devs that I have spoken to more performance enhancements are
slated for 5.6.
I am running a number of ubuntu servers, and I am actually considering
installing 5.5 which would be nice to have in the repositories and
eventually in a down stream ubuntu release.
Its important to note that Ubuntu already did this transition.
Ubuntu 12.04 (releasing tomorrow) ships with MySQL 5.5.22, and 5.1 has
been dropped from future Ubuntu releases. So there is at least some
precedent. The transition went rather smoothly. Most of the fixes done
in Ubuntu packages were pushed back into Debian and have been applied to
the Debian packages. 99% of the problem was packages with build-depends
on libmysqlclient16-dev instead of libmysqlclient-dev.
I would expect a rebuild transition to pickup the new version of
libmysqlclient. There are a few things which directly recommend or
suggest mysql-*-5.1, but those are, IMO, bugs, as the meta package is
the only one that will always be around.