[debian-mysql] Opinions on path/file renaming in MariaDB packaging?

[Otto Kekäläinen]

Hello,

We've discussed with Clint/SpamapS whether or not we should package
MariaDB with different paths from current MySQL and Clint suggested we
should discuss the matter on this list too. The two options are
described below - what are you opinions?


Option 1: same /etc/mysql and /var/lib/mysql for both MySQL and MariaDB
- the packages have Breaks-dependencies, so they will never be
installed at the same time and not use the same files at the same time
- at least for versions 5.5., MySQL and MariaDB are binary compatible
and you can switch the configs and database files back and forth
(MariaDB has some extra configs but MySQL ignores them, so it does not
matter)
- this is how MariaDB upstream does it
- if in the future the compability situation changes, we can package
5.6/10, 11, 12 etc in a different way and in fact will automatically
anyway package it differently if upstream changes any path or filename
from mysql to mariadb.

Option 2: use make options to get MariaDB install into /etc/mariadb
and /var/lib/mariadb
- the packages would still have Breaks-dependencies and not be
installable at the same time (as they occupy the same 3306 port when
running)
- if MySQL is installed and the end-user runs "apt-get install
mariadb-server", an automatic migration script would copy the MySQL
databases into the MariaDB directories and when installing
mysql-server there wouldn't be any automatic migration in the other
way
- even though 5.5. versions are still binary compatible, this kind of
packaging for any MariaDB version would perhaps be better future-proof
as the variable config and database files are not exposed to the
possibility of going back to MySQL use at any later point
- this is *not* how upstream MariaDB currently does it, so packaging
would need to maintain a patch that touches the 252 occurences of
"var/lib/mysql" and the 97 occurences of "etc/mysql" when converting
the upstream tar.gz into a Debian source package.

Thanks for your feeback!