[debian-mysql] percona vs. mariadb

[Steven Ayre]

> We should just ship the same major.minor release of all of them if
> they're going to share /etc/mysql/my.cnf.
>
> I'd prefer, though, that they didn't if at all possible. If they must,
> this probably means having them conflict and provide so that incompatible
> options don't cause issues.

What I can see causing issues though is that the server, client, and
anything linked against libmysqlclient could all be using that file.


>> mysql cluster
> Was in Debian before, and dropped

Sort of. MySQL Cluster forked into an entirely separate project which
has never been officially packaged for Debian. Both community server
and cluster are run by Oracle, I'm not sure why they haven't tried to
merge them back together. The version in Community Server was so
outdated that it was disabled. I'm not even sure if it's in 5.5 any
longer.

Incidentally I did do some work on packaging Cluster a few months ago,
but missed the Wheezy deadline. It'd need a sponsor anyway.
http://www.github.com/SteveAyre/mysql-cluster </shameless_plug>


> -1 for the Galera patched MySQL. I think thats going to lag too much
> behind MySQL proper. I'd much rather see this folded into mariadb and/or
> percona-server.

Incidentally there's also Percona XtraDB Cluster which uses Galera -
just to make things even more confusing! :o)


> Having all of these mean a really crazy amount of effort whenever there
> is a security bug.
>
> Perhaps we should just let the others ship from their own apt repo's,
> and pick one that serves all of the users with the least amount of
> surprise and work for our very limited maintenance team.

Agreed. I'm not in any way seriously suggesting Debian distributes and
supports the full list.

What would be worthwhile (in my opinion anyway) would be to find a way
to offer a selection. By doing so we'd also have the mechanism that
3rd parties could use to provide their own Debian-friendly packages.

What they have right now aren't necessarily Debian-friendly. For
example MySQL Cluster does offer .deb files, but they install to /opt;
and Percona's repository installs their own libmysqlclient which at
the time caused problems for several programs I was using. Plus there
are administration differences such as debian.cnf (which Percona do
not use) which leads to inconsistencies depending on which variant
you're using.


-Steve