Hi Otto, Thank you for bringing your ideas to this list, and for your excellent and sustained maintenance of MariaDB in Ubuntu over many years!
In order to provide full context, I will direct most of this reply to a general audience. As such I'll introduce myself: I am the maintainer for MySQL in Ubuntu and Debian Unstable. I also do what I can to make sure Otto's updates to MariaDB make it into Ubuntu. Reading the public commentary on this thread, I think there are some misconceptions. So I'd like to clarify a few things for everyone else reading this: * In Ubuntu, both MySQL and MariaDB are available. Users have a choice between the two options, and we do not override their decision. * MySQL, like MariaDB, remains Free Software and continues to use a license acceptable to both Debian and Ubuntu. We do not expect this to change. * The term "default" could refer to a number of things when it comes to us providing packages in Ubuntu. I'll clarify some of the possible meanings below, and how they may apply in this situation. As things stand currently, both MySQL and MariaDB will continue to be distributed by Ubuntu. Since we make both available, the choice of which to install is provided to the user. In that respect, there is no choice for Ubuntu to make here. Otto also mentioned that we could "potentially remove MySQL in some later release", but there is no suggestion to remove it immediately. I believe as long as it remains under an acceptable license, and someone is willing to maintain it in Ubuntu, that it would be contrary to our values for us to remove it at all. To my knowledge, Ubuntu has never required such a removal in distributing any other appropriately licensed and maintained upstream project. Having said that, here are the main technical choices to be made by Ubuntu when it comes to the "default" behavior: 1. What happens when the user "apt installs" a mysql package, such as "mysql-server" or "mysql-client"? Do they get MySQL or MariaDB? 2. What happens when the user "apt installs" one of the many applications in Ubuntu that requires a MySQL or similar database engine? apt will generally pull in an appropriate server and configure it automatically. Should it provide MySQL or MariaDB by default? Note that the user usually has the choice of picking the other regardless. 3. During package builds, when a package links using -lmysqlclient because it's using the MySQL C API, should we arrange that to link against MySQL or MariaDB? Note that the choice made here is generally invisible and makes no odds to the user. We must choose only for technical reasons. 4. Which of MySQL and MariaDB will Ubuntu ship in its main archive component, as opposed to its universe archive component? Regarding choice #1 - what happens when a user "apt installs mysql": Given that we ship both MySQL and MariaDB and will continue to do so, I think the user should get what they ask for. "apt install mysql-server" should not result in MariaDB being installed, as that would likely cause unnecessary confusion. If users want MariaDB, they can use "apt install mariadb-server" instead. Contrary to this point, in Debian, "apt install mysql-server" was arranged to install MariaDB. The situation was different there though, as the Debian release team imposed that Debian stable releases could not ship MySQL at all. So it was necessary for implementing an automatic upgrade path. That situation does not apply to Ubuntu, so there is no need to do that here. Before diving deeper into technical choices 2-4, is the above framing reasonable, or are there any other aspects to this/choices to make that I've missed? Thanks, Lena Voytek -- ubuntu-devel mailing list ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
