Re: Proposing the retirement of default-mysql-* metapackages for Forky

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Fri, 29 May 2026 09:00:04 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Paul Gevers <[email protected]> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On 5/29/26 05:19, Yavor Doganov wrote:
>> ... added separate autopkgtests to test its
>> MySQL backend with both MariaDB and MySQL.
>
> Debian doesn't ship MySQL in testing, so please don't test against
> MySQL in the default setup. As most or our autopkgtesting happens in a
> testbed with both unstable and testing, MySQL is available there, but
> for reference runs (and later in stable) it's not, so you get weird
> results.

Does anyone have thoughts on how to best deal with documentation and
naming related to this?

In libnss-mysql, I resolved the bug report with a brief d/control patch:

- default-libmysqlclient-dev,
+ libmariadb-dev-compat,
- default-mysql-server,
+ mariadb-server-compat,

however the Description: field still refers to MySQL:

 Description: NSS module for using MySQL/MariaDB as a naming service
 libnss-mysql provides a Name Service Switch module that allows MySQL/MariaDB
 to act as a name service.
 .
 Its configuration is very flexible by allowing to set an SQL query per NSS
 call (getpwnam, getpwuid, ...).
 .
 It currently supports storage of passwd, group and shadow information.

I thought about dropping 'MySQL' here and only refer to MariaDB, but
that begs the question about the name of the package.  But that's an
upstream matter, and upstream probably supports MySQL still too, so I
doubt they rename this to libnss-mariadb.

We could rename the binary package shipped by Debian into
'libnss-mariadb', but I think it will be confusing.

The issue that our Debian packaging of the upstream project does not
support MySQL.  Maybe that's what should be said?  I find this a general
problem with all our MySQL (well, MariaDB..) packages, and maybe there
should be some guidance on this.

Proposed new version:

 Description: NSS module for using MariaDB as a naming service
 libnss-mysql provides a Name Service Switch module that allows MariaDB
 to act as a name service.
 .
 Its configuration is very flexible by allowing to set an SQL query per NSS
 call (getpwnam, getpwuid, ...).
 .
 It currently supports storage of passwd, group and shadow information.
 .
 While upstream supports MySQL, this package only supports MariaDB since
 MySQL is not packaged by Debian.

/Simon

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