I feel strongly about this issue: I think it's time for Debian to embrace the true free software alternative to MySQL, which is now owned and vandalized by Oracle, through proprietary extensions or the recent embargo on security patch information.
In my opinion, this is unacceptable for an open source project and while
maybe it's premature to simply replace MySQL like we did for
LibreOffice, we should at the very least aim to get mariadb in shape for
wheezy, and possibly with backports to squeeze.
From what i understand reading this bug report, the main issue is that
MariaDB provides a drop-in replacement for MySQL which makes it hard for
both packages to be in archive, let alone be installed, at the same
time.
For example, the Ourdelta packages have a "mysql-common" binary package
which obviously overlaps with the Mysql source package. Also, there are
versionned dependencies on non-virtual packages from libdbd-mysql-perl
and so on that would require collaboration with the MySQL packging team.
Nevertheless, this seems to be a huge priority for free software, and
yes, I think it can be compared with the Libreoffice switch in the
community, which happened in great part because distros like Debian
stepped in to do the change by default.
Now, again, I believe both packages can live in parallel, but let's at
least ship this in wheezy.
Go?
--
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go
with the drove.
- Mark Twain
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