[debian-mysql] libmysqlclient-dev

[Robie Basak]

Hi Howard,

On Sat, Nov 05, 2016 at 04:04:13PM -0700, Howard Johnson wrote:
> I'm hoping to build LibreOffice using MariaDB 10.1 rather than MySQL 5.5.

> But libmysqlclient-dev is stalling because I don't have MySQL 5.5 installed.

> How is the best way to proceed forward with this?

In jessie? I believe we didn't provide the MariaDB of libmysqlclient at
all in jessie.

> Is it possible to modify libmysqlclient-dev to accept either MySQL or
> MariaDb, (given that MariaDB is a drop in replacement for MySQL)?

Note that while MariaDB may be a drop in replacement for MySQL, MySQL is
not a drop in replacement for MariaDB, so we cannot consider them to be
equivalent.

In the case of libmysqlclient, it isn't clear if MariaDB will ever ship
an API-compatible version of libmysqlclient20, for example.

So, to your question. In jessie? No, because it's already released. In
stretch? You should be building against default-libmysqlclient-dev and
this should end up building against MariaDB.

This works through libmariadbclient-dev-compat, which conflicts with
libmysqlclient-dev and provides a MariaDB libmysclient.so (actually it's
just a symlink to libmariabclient.so) instead of a MySQL one.

> Hope you can help, and if not, if you might suggest who or how I might get
> this done.

We didn't support this in jessie. In stretch, we do. If you want this in
jessie, I'm not sure what you expect us to change. If you are using
backports, then it's up to the backports policy I suppose, and I have no
particular objection.

Robie