Bug#917303: Request for help with MariaDB 10.3 / libdbd-mysql-perl packaging

[pali at cpan.org]

Hello!

The main problem is that DBD::mysql touches internal libmariadb.so
structures which for obvious reasons do not have stable nor documented
API.

In DBD::MariaDB I replaced this code by usage of public Connector/C API.
But for buggy Perl application this may cause incompatibility.

Changes are in this pull request:
https://github.com/gooddata/DBD-MariaDB/pull/63

To prevent breakage of other Perl modules which uses DBD::mysql I
strongly suggest to stick with MySQL Connector/C or use MariaDB 10.0 or
10.1 which is known to work.

One of the reason why I forked and created DBD::MariaDB instead of
touching DBD::mysql is support for MariaDB 10.2+, 10.3+.

Basically touching these parts of DBD::mysql code may cause problems for
applications which misuse bugs in DBD::mysql. There was long discussion
about it 2 years ago and people decided that it rather should not be
changed. (Reason for fork and move to DBD::MariaDB). If you want to
prevent any possible breakage, then you have no other option and should
stick with either MySQL 5.5-5.7 or with MariaDB 10.0/10.1.

And if you really want to update MariaDB to 10.3, I strongly suggest to
also update packages from DBD::mysql to DBD::MariaDB.

For DBD::MariaDB we have large test coverage with different MySQL and
MariaDB versions, including MariaDB 10.3 and 10.4 series, see:

https://travis-ci.org/gooddata/DBD-MariaDB

Seems that in DBD::mysql upstream rather decided to drop MariaDB 10.3
support as trying to fix it, see:

https://github.com/perl5-dbi/DBD-mysql/commit/0c4fee5d928efdf937fdf5fdba5f4873b01848ef

And rather started fixing support for MySQL 8.0 series:

https://github.com/perl5-dbi/DBD-mysql/commit/08df02eabf08de62a5e363fbf852ca51f685a8ce

Maybe another option can be inclusion of MySQL 8.0 for DBD::mysql?