On Thu, 11 May 2017 12:50:07 -0500 Richard Owlett <rowl...@cloud85.net> wrote:
> I'm having problems with initial use of mariadb on Debian Testing. > The *apparent* symptom is never being asked to provide an initial > password an failure in creating one later. > OK, it looks like I'm wrong, and the Debian packaging of mariadb is *not* a drop-in replacement for mysql, at least from a clean installation. I was sort of under the impression that Debian had changed horses to mariadb, and managed it with metafiles and transition packages, but it appears that both my wheezy server and my sid workstation are still on mysql. I'm using mariadb, but apparently only on my Win8 laptop. What is much more to the point is that the packages for sid (and presumably other distributions) are utterly different, with mysql-server-5.7 having all the expected Debian stuff, with its control file containing the statement: "This package contains all the infrastructure needed to setup system databases." The mariadb package, on the other hand, has a control directory that contains only md5sums and control files: specifically, in this particular situation, no postinst file. So mariadb is never going to be configured by Debian on installation, and the OP's problem is explained, at least to the first level. The immediate answer in Debian would seem to be 'forget mariadb, install mysql', but what about the longer term? Does anyone know where mariadb is going in Debian? It would appear that mariadb can be installed 'properly' using a package from the mariadb site: https://www.tecmint.com/install-mariadb-in-debian/ -- Joe
