MySQL and MariaDB in Fedora

[Honza Horak]

On 04/05/2013 08:06 PM, Norvald Ryeng wrote:
> ----- hhorak at redhat.com wrote:
>
>> On 03/21/2013 08:36 PM, Norvald Ryeng wrote:
>>> What is the deadline for fixing the remaining issues with MySQL and
>>> MariaDB in Fedora? We would like to find a solution and get 5.6 in
>>> soon.
>>
>> Hi Norvald,
>>
>> I've just asked for creating component community-mysql, as discussed on
>> fedora-devel above, the review is done already. As soon as it is built
>> in koji I'm going to EOL MySQL component. So I'm expecting to be done in
>> the beginning of the next week.
>
> I see you've bumped the epoch of the MariaDB packages to force MariaDB as default when both MySQL and MariaDB provide mysql-server. We've tested it, and it seems to do the trick.
>
> Could you rename the MySQL packages to mysql-community-* instead of community-mysql-*? That way the prefix aligns with the product name and OpenSuSE's prefix.

I wanted to use that, but then found out that it wouldn't work. The 
problem is that it has the same prefix as virtual name "mysql", that is 
used as requirement in other packages. As a result, when somebody asked 
for "mysql" -- "mysql-community" would be preferred before mariadb, 
because according [1] rule #9 ("check the prefix of the pkg to the 
requiring pkg prefix (perl-foo and perl-lib) for each common character 
in the prefix add 2 points to the provider's score") would be applied.

When we use the name "community-mysql" we don't have any same prefix, so 
the rule #10 is applied ("if, at this point, we have pkgs with an equal 
score - look at the version of the provide"), which means mariadb with 
higher epoch will be chosen.

Generally, I don't like either, that packages in openSUSE an Fedora 
won't have the same name, but openSUSE has a bit more powerful RPM spec 
to handle such things.

[1] http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/CompareProviders

> How do we get push access to the git repo? It would be great to get 5.6 in before the test day on April 30.

To get involved, just follow standard process as described on Fedora wiki:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_package_collection_maintainers

However, I'd rather wait with 5.6 until F20 because of the following 
reasons:
* we are almost a month after feature freeze
* I believe users will have enough concerns with switching to MariaDB 
and MySQL-5.6 would bring others
* better wait a bit longer to stabilize the new release than bring a 
quite important package too soon

Regards,
Honza