Yum plugin for prioritize providers [was Re: Fwd: MariaDB replacing MySQL]

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 6:30 PM, Honza Horak <hhorak at redhat.com> wrote:
> In case of MySQL/mariadb (just for demonstration) the config file would
> contain say:
>     MySQL       +10000
>     mariadb     -10000
> which would tell yum to prioritize MySQL.
>
> I'm sure that there are several other use cases for such utility. It would
> bring a bit more complexity on the one hand, but would decrease ambiguity in
> specific cases on the other hand.
>
> Any ideas about such tool/plugin?

I'm not following the MySQL/mariadb packaging discussion in full
detail - however, if we got to the point of discussing special yum
plugins, wouldn't it be much simpler to

* Modify the 10 packages that require mysql-server, the 19 packages
that require mysql, the 3 packages that require mysql-libs (all F18
counts) to require mariadb-* explicitly instead of using the virtual
provide

* Make sure that only mariadb-libs, not Oracle MySQL, Provides: the
libmysqlclient soname?

That's about 35 packages to touch, and all but one of them trivial
modifications.

(On the general question: multiple providers are always problematic -
the interfaces are usually mostly but not fully compatible, some of
the cases won't be tested, etc., so I'm not too enthusiastic about
encouraging them.)
    Mirek