[debian-mysql] About packages that depend on mysql-* / mariadb / virtual-mysql-*

[Otto Kekäläinen]

2016-07-05 12:41 GMT+03:00 Jonathan Wiltshire <jmw at debian.org>:
> I don't think I understand why you would have both virtual-mysql-* and
> default-mysql-* packages for dependencies (leaving aside build-deps). If a
> package requires one of the variants, it will need an explicit dependency.
> If it doesn't care, it should use the default.
>
> Therefore are the virtual-* packages required?
>
> As virtual packages provided by >1 package breaks build-dependency
> handling, if there is any danger that these might be used in build-depends
> they should be meta-packages, not virtual.

Maintainers need to have 2 options:

1. depend on a specific one
OR
2. depend on the default one but be work with any of them

default-mysql-* only points to a single option. If the admin of system
has already installed MariaDB, Oracle, Percona, mysql-wsrep or
whatever is available from 3rd party repositories, they should be able
to continue using that option and not forced into installing what
default-mysql-* points to.

Using "Depends: mysql-default-server | virtual-mysql-server" allows
this flexibility. Also, mysql-virtual-* has been in production since
2013 and is implemented everywhere, we should not break it now.

>> > 3. libmysqlclient.so.18
...
> I wonder if pkgconfig can be any help here? That involves a one-time change
> to client packages if they don't already use pkgconfig but doesn't have to
> be repeated if the default switches.

I don't know, I am not faimiliar with it. I'll research.