[debian-mysql] percona vs. mariadb

[Norvald H. Ryeng]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 23:41:20 +0100, Otto Kekäläinen <otto at fsfe.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> 2013/3/7 Bjoern Boschman <bjoern at boschman.de>:
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> I totally aggree that different sql-server branches must not share those
>> data!
>
> At least at the moment when MariaDB and MySQL are binary-compatible,
> they should share the same data. That makes it easy for admins to
> switch servers. Compare the situation to packages nginx-light and
> nginx-full: same conf files, but different binaries and conflicts each
> other, so both binaries can't be installed at once.

I believe sharing files is a bad idea. MySQL and MariaDB release schedules  
are not synchronized, so features arrive at different points in time, and  
this includes adding and removing config options. I think it's best to  
separate them early on to avoid problems in the future.

At the moment, we (Oracle) are working with Fedora to find out how to have  
both MariaDB and MySQL in the distro at the same time. The main problem  
seems to be how to reliably choose one as default when the server is drawn  
in as a dependency. I believe it's a bit easier with apt than with yum,  
but we still need to think this through very carefully to make sure we  
don't end up in trouble. I'll know more when we've solved this in Fedora,  
and I think whatever we find out there will be good input to the planning  
process.

Regards,

Norvald H. Ryeng