Proposed F19 Feature: Replace MySQL with MariaDB

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 01/23/2013 02:55 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-01-23 at 02:12 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> writes:
>>> Tom Lane (tgl at redhat.com) said:
>>>> (If the compatibility testing goes *really* smoothly, maybe we could
>>>> just drop the requirement for original mysql to still be available,
>>>> in which case it reduces to the standard package-replacement problem.
>>>> But I'm not prepared to bet on that quite yet.)
>>> Honestly, I'd be curious as to whether we could get all the compatibility
>>> testing done early enough, and packages changed, such that we could consider
>>> dropping MySQL. It's just... cleaner.
>> Quite honestly, I'd prefer that too.  But we need to have a good case
>> that it's not going to break very many things for very many people.
>> Database people hate it when you break their database.  So ... as
>> mentioned in the feature page, we really need help testing this during
>> the F19 devel cycle.  We'll need to make decisions before we reach
>> alpha/beta stage.
> Yeah, 'all the compatibility testing' is something of a vague idea to
> pin down :) We can certainly run a couple of test days and ask as many
> people as possible to try Maria on their setups and make sure nothing's
> amiss, but it's the kind of thing where it's pretty hard to know you've
> covered everything. I'm no SQL expert and I'm not sure who is; is there
> anyone who's well-experienced in this area who would be willing to lead
> testing efforts? Is there any kind of well-known, respected test suite
> for MySQL?

Once upon a time I was an SQL expert (circa 1985-89), and I have little 
interest in expending the effort to once again be an expert in SQL (been 
there, done that, got the scars).  I DO know a number of SQL experts, 
but they tend to be well paid by big companies that have big SQL 
requirements.

The whole thought of developing a test suite scares the bejebers out of 
me; again I have friends that have monster data sets to test new 
commercial software against before they let their corporate developers 
touch the latest and greatest.  And then to do it so that it will test 
for potential security issues.  Very scary.  But in the same light, one 
can say considering how important data is, perhaps a long range view on 
this is needed.  But how to keep such an effort into becoming mysql 2.0? 
(the effort becoming commercial and then owned by an upstream developer).

This whole thread is scary.  <shutter>