Bug#702280: Add alternative (build-)dependency: libmariadbclient-dev

[Axel Beckert]

Hi again,

Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> 2014-04-01 15:14 GMT+03:00 gregor herrmann <gregoa at debian.org>:
> > I might be missing something, but this still seems impossible. In
> > order to build both flavours, we'd need to build-depend on both
> > libmariadbclient-dev and libmysqlclient-dev, but libmariadbclient-dev
> > still seems to have a "Breaks: libmysqlclient-dev" which makes the
> > two packages not co-installable.
> 
> Yes, your right, it isn't possible. Actually what would be needed is
> to have two separate source packages which are almost identical,
> except for the client library soname. Would you by any chance feel
> like you would like to maintain an extra libdbd-mariadb-perl package?

I see a few more (IMHO more realistic) possibilities:

A)

What about a meta-package called e.g. mysql-or-mariadb-client-dev which
depends on either libmariadbclient-dev or libmysqlclient-dev and all
packages should depend on mysql-or-mariadb-client-dev instead of
libmariadbclient-dev or libmysqlclient-dev?

Then the switch would be a single upload of
mysql-or-mariadb-client-dev plus a bunch of binNMUs.

This though doesn't allow the user to switch between two versions of
libdbd-mysql-perl -- only the whole distribution would switch at one
point.

B)

What about building a second libmariadbclient-dev package, e.g.
libmariadbclient-dev-coinstallable which installs all files to another
path which is not in the include path by default (and hence would not
conflict with libmysqlclient-dev nor with libmariadbclient-dev) but
can be used instead of libmysqlclient-dev by adding some -I directives
to the compiler or so?

As far as I can see currently, this could solve all issues of that
kind. (It though would probably surface some issues where -I is not
propagated properly to all compiler commands. But I'd consider that a
good thing from the point of code quality. :-)

	    Regards, Axel (currently in braindump mode :-)
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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