Many of the new dependencies are related to MariaDB 10.1 including Galera by default. Very good if you can track where exactly they are used as suggest how we lax the dependency without introducing regressions.
In addition to the official git.debian.org mariadb-10.1 repository there is also a Github mirror if you are able to produce a patch and want to open a pull request: https://github.com/ottok/mariadb-10.1
