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

Lena Voytek <[email protected]> Sat, 30 May 2026 12:14:56 -0400

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

Hi,

As the maintainer of MySQL in unstable and Ubuntu, I agree that would not be great. MySQL will
continue to be the default dependency for packages that support it in Ubuntu for the time being. So
as long as upstreams are willing to support it, I think it would be best to reduce support as little
as possible on the Debian side for the sake of downstream distros.

Thanks!
Lena

On Sat, 2026-05-30 at 07:34 +0200, Paul Gevers wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 5/29/26 09:00, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> >   While upstream supports MySQL, this package only supports MariaDB since
> >   MySQL is not packaged by Debian.
> 
> 
> Thinking of our downstreams, I don't think it great to mention "not 
> packaged by Debian" in the description. It's not even true, it's 
> packaged in unstable. Last time I looked our big downstream Ubuntu even 
> had MySQL as default, so I think putting wording like this in the 
> description isn't helpful in the ecosystem. If upstream support MySQL 
> (your words in the example), I think the Debian package should do too 
> (to the extend that we don't make it difficult to use MySQL instead of 
> MariaDB if the user so wishes). What could be factually correct is 
> saying that only automated testing only happens with MariaDB in Debian. 
> Maybe it's best to assume people using the package will just get the 
> defaults (MariaDB) and if you use MySQL, they already know the stance of 
> Debian.
> 
> All in all, I suggest to leave that last line out.
> 
> Paul

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