[debian-mysql] [Summary] Request for release team decision on MySQL and MariaDB

[Robie Basak]

Hi Otto,

I agree entirely with the principles you presented, and thank you for
making them.

You also made some technical arguments (and I appreciate that they are
technical and thus valuable and actionable), which I would like to
rebut.

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 12:45:59AM +0200, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> - Quality: mysql-5.6 has 135 open bugs despite never being part of a
> Debian release and thus having exposure to the big Debian user masses.
> Some of them are even RC. The package mariadb-10.0 has only 10 bugs,
> which of 5 were filed by myself as TODO items with priority wishlist,
> and it actually ships in Jessie for big audience.

Many bugs were mass transferred from src:mysql-5.5, predate any recent
work, and haven't had any recent activity. On the other hand, MariaDB
being a relatively new package would be expected to have far fewer of
this class of bugs. I have prioritised fixing bigger issues first, over
going through the ancient bugs.

So I think this is an accurate reflection of how well MySQL was
maintained in the past, but not how it is maintained now.

> - Quality: mysql-5.6 ships the same version number
> libmysqlclient.so.18 as 5.5 but the ABI is different and according to
> investigations by Robie Basak going back September 2014 [1] the
> upgrade might break something, and while it is now partially remedied,
> the ABI bump has never been done, the symbols file to track this all
> is missing from the packaging, and there is a Lintian override to keep
> Lintian quiet about the lack of a symbols file [2]

I think this is an excellent example of how well MySQL is maintained and
how well upstream are working with us to sort things out. I was diligent
in finding the problem and then upstream got involved. Upstream did all
the investigatory work to figure out how this impacts Debian, worked
with Debian on deciding what we should do about it, and have now fixed
this and the symbols exported in 5.7 properly. If MySQL gets to stay, I
expect to have 5.7 in Debian soon. The lintian override is ancient,
inherited and I'm happy to remove it.

I tend to focus my efforts on the future, doing the extra thing now to
solve the problem forever. This does mean that it appears poorer in the
short term. I think this should translate to "diligently
well-maintained", not "badly maintained".

> - Quality: mysql-5.6 only runs ~600 tests as part of their Debian
> build, while MariaDB has 4000+ tests, making MySQL test coverage much
> smaller than the MariaDB one, thus catching less issues on many of the
> Debian platforms as Oracle MySQL probalby don't test those at all
> in-house.

This was a deliberate decision to speed up maintenance velocity. I
worked with Oracle to figure out which tests were likely to be useful
from a package maintenance perpsective, and which weren't. We documented
this in debian/README.maintainer. The number of tests run doesn't really
help quantify usefulness. If the release team disagrees with this
principle, I'd be happy to reverse it.

>  - Activity: Since the beginning of 2015 mysql-5.6 packaging master
> branch in Debian unstable has had 118 commits by 12 authors, while the
> mariadb-10.0 master branch in Debian has had in the same time 231
> commits by 14 authors (authors don't include patch submissions and
> translators). I would claim MariaDB is more actively maintained. Note
> that uploads are done by Robie and me for mysql-5.6 and mariadb-10.0,
> who both are DMs. The team does not have any really active DDs at the
> moment, which is a problem for both packages.

I've been working on what I feel are the big issues first, which take
considerable thought and care but don't result in many commits of lines
of code changed. Right now my focus is on 5.7 and also the "flags issue"
that also affects MariaDB. So I don't think it's fair to use a commit
number statistic to determine maintenance activity.

Robie
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