[debian-mysql] Fixing the jessie->stretch upgrade path

[Norvald H. Ryeng]

On Fri, 12 May 2017 11:26:13 +0200
Ondřej Surý <ondrej at sury.org> wrote:

> Dear release team and fellow MySQL/MariaDB maintainers,
> 
> the situation in stretch in regards to clean upgrade path from jessie
> is a little bit unfortunate. It works for most cases when something
> depends on default-mysql-server and pulls it as a dependency. But in
> situations where mysql-server was the top dependency, it simply
> uninstalls mysql-server-5.5 without any replacement.
> 
> I understand the reasons why we are here, but the situation where user
> needs to do:
> apt-get update
> # apt-get upgrade
> apt-get install default-mysql-server
> apt-get dist-upgrade
> 
> is very inconvenient for the users and I foresee this will cause a lot
> of complaints, because it's quite common to run just "mysql-server" on
> the server.
> 
> Therefore I am proposing a one time fix specifically targeted at
> stretch. I would like to prepare 'mysql-transitional' package that
> will create a couple of dummy/transitional packages structured like
> this:
> 
> mysql-server depends on default-mysql-server
> mysql-client depends on default-mysql-client
> 
> The version would be 5.5.999+mariadb, so it is always higher than
> version in jessie, but always lower than version in sid, as I don't
> want force epoch on mysql-5.7.

I agree that this will work for stretch.

You say it's a one time fix, but I'm a bit concerned about what
happens after this fix, when those packages are provided by MySQL. Let's
think through what will happen in buster. There are three options:

1) Buster contains only MariaDB. Will these packages also be in buster?

2) Buster contains both MySQL and MariaDB. MariaDB is default. The
mysql-server and mysql-clienpackages are provided by MySQL