[debian-mysql] Common mechanism for detecting which MySQL variant and version is installed

[Lars Tangvald]

Hi all,

As MariaDB and MySQL diverge, we're more and more running into issues 
with third-party packages only working with one of them (generally 
MariaDB in Debian and MySQL in Ubuntu). Generally this boils down to 
fairly small differences in behavior with server init and startup, so if 
these packages had a simple way of detecting which variant is installed 
provided by the packages themselves, having support for both would not 
be hard.

One idea is to just include a tiny util script that outputs the basic 
information, e.g. "mysql 5.7.18" or "mariadb 10.2". You can get the same 
info from parsing package version or similar, but it would be less 
robust as you'd have to .

Any other ideas or thoughts about this? We'd need it in both MySQL and 
MariaDB (and other, external packages that can take their place) for it 
to be useful.

--
Lars