> Firstly, some admins may be bound to mysql because of the certification or similar reason, but it probably won't be a technical reason. It'd be nice if admins work with providers in such cases and push them to add mariadb into set of "supported" options. I believe there won't be technical barrier to do so, so everyone could benefit from that.
>

Any admins retiring stability and certification probably shouldn't be running fedora anyway... But that's a side issue. As an admin they are welcome to use upstream (if oracle provide a fedora compatible repo) if mysql is removed from fedora... Or just not migrate to Mariadb if both end up packaged.

> Second, if mariadb differs more in the future and stops to be "drop-in" replacement, then we'll need an alternative for applications, where mariadb won't be suitable enough. Nevertheless, this is not a current issue right now.
>

Indeed this is a straw man effectively.

> When we're talking about testing, there is a mariadb package built in rawhide already:
>   https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=380910
>
> We're not using obsoletes for now, so in order to install the builds you can do the following (after the packages will by synced into rawhide repo):
>

It'll be worthwhile typo get this into F18 as others have suggested to test without the risk of rawhide eating their data ;-)

For what it's worth the brief interaction with the two Oracle employees in this thread sounds very similar to statements made by Oracle with respect to Hudson and OpenOffice.org with lots of promises on one hand but those mostly being fluff... Of course the history there speaks for itself.

From a pragmatic point of view it would make sense for Oracle to maintain the package within the Fedora Packaging Guidelines with mariadb having suitable provides I see no real benefit in allowing the two to be installed side by side though.... An admin should be able to switch fairly easily... The use of yum shell could even be avoided if the yum replace plugin at IUS community is brought up to official fedora repositories...

If/when Oracle shows an inability to stay within the guidelines it should then be comparatively clean to remove the mysql packages from the official fedora repositories at the next sensible moment.

This will certainly be an interesting topic over this development cycle as similar ones were in slightly different communities.