[debian-mysql] Please help with MariaDB packaging and testing for Stretch

[Otto Kekäläinen]

Hello!

As you can see in the pkg-mysql-maint mailing list traffic, bug
reports and in https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-mysql/mariadb-10.1.git/log/
with 46 commits in the last 2 weeks, I've done my best to make sure
MariaDB is perfect for Stretch and the number of bugs, Lintian
complaints and other errors is very low. The upload of 10.1.21-2 was
very good, but then came in more patches I felt deserved to be
included, but my processing of them didn't go all that well because I
didn't have enough time and energy to do everything as as I should
had.

Right now though I feel worn out and need to rest.

Can somebody help here?

There are still issues that deserve to be fixed. For example in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=852495 there is an
extensive and good looking patch attached, that could fix a
potentially relevant problem (though I wasn't able to reproduce it in
my tests). It would be a shame not to process this patch.

In http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-mysql-maint/2017-January/010397.html
I documented the latest Jessie -> Stretch upgrade tests I've done. We
don't have any automation to repeat these tests, so for every new
commit in mariadb-10.1 the risk increases that the results don't match
the testing done anymore.

I am utlizing http://buildbot.askmonty.org/buildbot/grid?branch=ok-debpkg-10.1&category=main&category=experimental
and my own builder http://labs.seravo.fi/~otto/debian/build.log for
semi-continious testing, plus we have Piuparts in Debian etc, but none
of these are designed to provide the kind of distro upgrade testing we
need now, and I cannot activate Travis-CI because the .travis.yml
needs to be in the project root folder, where in Debian packaging we
are allowed only to modify debian/*. Suggestions for better tooling
are also helpful.

- Otto