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

[Kristian Nielsen]

Steven Ayre <steveayre at gmail.com> writes:

> Are there any tools that would expect my.cnf in /etc/mysql, and therefore
> might break if MariaDB is installed rather than MySQL? Certainly many
> client programs would expect it there (without specifying the path anyway),
> and therefore you'd probably still need to install mysql-common alongside.
> That could lead to confusion about which settings are being used.

Yes. I believe my.cnf is read by anything that uses libmysqlclient.

I would suggest to have a single mysqlcommon package, shared between MySQL and
MariaDB server. That is how the packages are now anyway. There is an extra
mariadb-common package, all MariaDB options not available in MySQL are put in
this package (in /etc/mysql/conf.d/mariadb.cnf).

The deeper issue is: which libmysqlclient18 library should all other packages
be linked against, the MySQL one or the MariaDB one? Since Norvald is Oracle
and I am from MariaDB, I suppose we are too biased for our input to be
suitable here ...

> Data directory path shouldn't really matter on the other hand IMO, since
> such tools should really be reading that from the config file.

The main argument for using same data directory is:

 - This makes it easy for people to move from an existing MySQL setup to
   MariaDB, just `apt-get install mariadb`.

 - This auto-migration has been well-tested during the last 3-4 years, so is
   available mostly for free.

It is not as easy to do a good automatic migration in the other direction, as
Oracle does not merge MariaDB stuff back, so it is not compatible with new
MariaDB features.

Debian has traditionally had automatic migration (eg. MySQL 5.0->5.1), but we
can remove it of course, might make things simpler for package maintainers.

 - Kristian.