[debian-mysql] Bug#671115: Bug#671115: transition: mysql-5.5

[Adam D. Barratt]

On Tue, 2012-05-08 at 06:18 -0700, Clint Byrum wrote:
> On May 8, 2012, at 2:04, Julien Cristau <jcristau at debian.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, May  1, 2012 at 22:52:22 +0100, Nicholas Bamber wrote:
> >> At some point we need to transition from mysql-5.1 to mysql-5.5. We
> >> would like to do this before the freeze though we appreciate that time
> >> is now short. We arrived at this position as the Debian MySQL Team became
> >> increasingly understaffed. It is better now but not ideal.
[...]
> To be fair, this transition was already completed in Ubuntu and I
> filed bugs against all packages that failed with patches. Most if not
> all of these patches have been applied.
> 
> I would expect this transition to go quite smoothly and just to
> require rebuilds given the  experience we had in Ubuntu.

The problem is that the recent set of php5 security updates are
currently stuck in unstable, because they picked up a dependency on
libmysqlclient18.

For most library transitions, this wouldn't be such a big problem as we
could push the new version of the source in and have britney keep the
old library around in testing for as long as there were
reverse-dependencies; indeed there was some hope that with mysql-5.5
being a separate source package, this would be even easier as the two
source packages could co-exist.

However, it turns out that won't work - the 5.5 packages have:

Breaks: mysql-client-5.1 (<< 5.5), mysql-server-5.1 (<< 5.5),
mysql-server-core-5.1 (<< 5.5)

and there are no versions of those packages with versions >= 5.5 (so I'm
not entirely sure what the logic behind the version constraints is).
Various -5.1 packages have versioned dependencies on other binaries from
that source, which means we can't even mitigate the problem by adding
Provides from the 5.5 packages.  Providing them as real transitional
packages from the 5.5 source would probably work, unless there's some
reason that's a crazy suggestion?

(There's also a mysql-5.1 upload which can't migrate to testing, as
britney is convinced that it needs mysql-5.5 to migrate first;
presumably because the latter now provides the
mysql-{client,common,server} binary packages in unstable.)

Regards,

Adam