[debian-mysql] Bug#793316: Bug#793316: transition: mysql-5.6

[Clint Byrum]

Excerpts from Paul Wise's message of 2015-07-23 21:09:13 -0700:
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 5:06 AM, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> 
> > The wish of the release team and security team has been to keep just
> > one MySQL variant. If such a decision is made, it must be made above
> > the pkg-mysql-maint team as the team will never be able to agree which
> > favourite is the best one.
> >
> > After Clint's MySQL 5.7 advertisement I am tempted to present what I
> > like feature wise in MariaDB (in current and upcoming versions), but
> > let's not start such an discussion, as this is not the time or place
> > for such a contest. Let's just be happy that we have Free Software
> > based options and competition that drives innovation forward for
> > everybody.
> 
> Stupid question on behalf of a lurker: what would it take for Oracle
> MySQL, MariaDB, Percona and any other MySQL forks to be merged into
> one upstream project?
> 

An act of god?

The orgs running the projects simply have different goals, and the
architecture doesn't lend itself to an apache-style "just make a mod to
make it do what you want" community. Drizzle was an attempt to modularize
MySQL, but it fizzled out when corporate sponsorship dried up.

I _could_ see MariaDB merging most of the patches in the Percona variants
(many have already been merged), but Percona would likely still want to
run its own fork to be able to address their customers' service needs
in an open-source platform. If Oracle didn't have a private bug tracker,
or their weird policies, Percona might also be able to just work in-tree
for MySQL, but that's just not going to happen. :-P

It's a tangled web, so there's no really obvious answer to all of this.