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

[Bill Nottingham]

Miloslav Trmač (mitr at volny.cz) said: 
> 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.

This does sound much simpler, IMO.

Bill