[debian-mysql] Bug#1029136: MariaDB configuration files not properly migrated on switch to unversioned packages

[Otto Kekäläinen]

> > This is now solved on
> > https://salsa.debian.org/mariadb-team/mariadb-server/-/merge_requests/31
>
> Mangling the maintainers scripts of another package is a delicate issue
> as it's often fragile and can cause hard to debug failures in corner cases.
>
> Personally, I would have turned the versioned packages into empty
> transitional packages. This would have made the upgrade process much
> smoother and avoided this issue altogether (the new empty versioned
> packages would have no maintainer scripts).
> It's also common practice for such use cases.
>
> Any reason why you didn't consider this approach?

I did write the code for empty packages and tested it (as visible in
the merge request above) but it would have created much more moving
parts and failures elsewhere. Fixing the maintainer scripts proved to
be the most elegant solution.