[debian-mysql] Help request: analyze build failures in packages that depend on MariaDB

[Robie Basak]

Are these bugs really in those packages or is this really a failure in
libmariadb-dev-compat to maintain API compatibility against the
libmysqlclient-dev API? Or is it incorrect for Debian to be claiming
compatibility against default-libmysqlclient-dev? Clearly this is a
matter of your point of view. It's not my intention to argue semantics.
But if we still want to maintain default-libmysqlclient-dev and the
ability to link against both, compatibility matters and the lack of
compatibility is a problem.

MariaDB's client library was originally touted (in Debian) as a drop-in
replacement for MySQL. I understand that there are two different MariaDB
client libraries involved here (the one forked from MySQL and the
separate ground-up implementation by MariaDB I think?). If reverse
dependency *upstream* projects want to switch to use a different client
library, that's up to them - but I'm not sure it's appropriate for our
team to be forcing this switch on to the *maintainers of those packages*
in Debian, unless compatibility is maintained. That seems backwards to
me.

I think this question needs to be resolved before asking maintainers of
reverse dependencies to change anything, since they're going to measure
their success against a build of libmariadb-dev-compat (via
default-libmysqlclient-dev) and this isn't necessarily correct if such a
fix then causes a FTBFS against libmysqlclient-dev.

I therefore propose to explain this in the blocking bugs and tag them
all 'moreinfo' until we've resolved this question.
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