Marian Marinov
I'm trying to build MariaDB packages for CentOS. But the problem I have is that the Policy of the distro does not allow packages that are drop-in replacements of core packages. Meaning that I can not simply build MariaDB which will provide libmysqlclient and mysql binaries.
Can you share with me what is the situation over in the Debian/Ubuntu camp ?
In Debian/Ubuntu, there are no "Official" MariaDB packages yet. The ones we provide do replace the standard mysql packages, which is possible since there are no policies enforced for 3rd-party repositories. It will need to be fixed eventually, of course. The normal way I think in Debian is to have MariaDB and MySQL as alternatives, just like Some versions of Ubuntu/Debian have mysql-5.0 and mysql-5.1 as alternatives (can install one or the other, but not both). It is not 100% clear to me what your situation is (I'm not much familiar with CentOS or RPM). Are you saying that the MariaDB packages you create *must* be possible to install alongside the Official CentOS packages? In that case I suppose you have little option but to run mariadb on a different port, different data directory, different socket, different binary names. It seems to be sub-optimal for users, as they would need to reconfigure anything they want to use with MariaDB away from the standard port/names in the MySQL world. Still, this is perfectly possible to do. Configure a non-standard port in your my.cnf, build and install mariadb with a different --prefix, /opt/mariadb or whatever. - Kristian.