Jim,

That PHP warning does not make sense to me , so please do not feel guilty or unsafe with the setup. “Unpredictable behavior” will not happen, going from 5.3.9 client to 5.5 server . Client-server programs are normally designed such that different client and server versions are able to communicate, and MySQL/MariaDB is not an exception here. I included “the” MySQL/PHP experts (actually the authors of the official MySQL drivers) , my former colleagues, on CC. I hope they are able to give a detailed, reasoned and a historic annotation of why the warning is in place.

Wlad

From: maria-developers-bounces+wlad=montyprogram.com@lists.launchpad.net [mailto:maria-developers-bounces+wlad=montyprogram.com@lists.launchpad.net] On Behalf Of Jim Nelin
Sent: Freitag, 19. Oktober 2012 17:02
To: maria-developers@lists.launchpad.net
Subject: [Maria-developers] libmysqlclient16 for MariaDB 5.5?

Hi guys!

I just recently joined this team/list, so I'm going to be polite and introduce myself. My name is Jim, work mainly as a server technician and developer and I've been using MariaDB for the past 2 years or so.
Just recently i upgraded one of my older MySQL 5.1 nodes to MariaDB 5.5 - which comes with a lot of nice new features (I've previously only used MariaDB 5.1 and 5.2)

I mainly use Debian nodes (stable/squeeze) for my and my clients projects.

One thing i discovered shortly after the first upgrade was that there was no libmysqlclient16 (or libmariadbclient16) for the 5.5 release of MariaDB - only the new libmysqlclient18.
This causes my applications to still use the older MySQL 5.1 release of libmysqlclient16 from the stable debian repo. As a lot of packages in Debian Squeeze (and squeeze-backports) still depends on libmysqlclient16 (php5-mysql, postfix-mysql, dovecot-common to mention a few.)

It still works without any problems, with the stable/squeeze 5.1 mysqlclientlib16 (afaik anyway), but seems a bit risky to use an older client-lib against a newer server (I'm not aware of the changes in the client lib between 5.1 and 5.5 tho).

The work-around this (to make it "a bit" better) was to manually install the .deb packages from MariaDB 5.3 which DO contain libmysqlclient16  (libmysqlclient16-5.3.9-mariadb117~squeeze).
This still isn't "perfect" in my opinion - i would love to have a real lib(mysql|mariadb)client16 for the 5.5 release on Debian Squeeze.

This is my current "setup" is the following: http://paste.debian.net/hidden/7c8219e0/ (basicly the client16-lib from 5.3 against a 5.5 server).

I understand that it won't be any performance increases or similar due to older applications not using the new features in libmysqlclient18 or mDB 5.5.

But it would help me to get rid of the warning below in phpMyAdmin and also make me feel more safe with the setup - a more consistent setup.
"Your PHP MySQL library version 5.3.9-MariaDB differs from your MySQL server version 5.5.27. This may cause unpredictable behavior."

So, the questions is - why is there isn't any libmysqlclient16 for MariaDB 5.5? And it possible to add it to the repos?
If not - why? Can this be solved with a virtual package or wrapper-lib of some kind against libmariadbclient18?

Please correct me if I've got something wrong.

Thanks in advance,
Best Regards
--
Jim Nelin | +46 (0)720 454 909
Jine | http://jine.se | jim@jine.se