[Moving the discussion to maria-developers@, please use the public mailing lists for discussions like this] Alexey Botchkov <holyfoot@askmonty.org> writes:

No matter what dependencies or new packages i created inside MariaDB, Debian's first idea was to try to install the 'later' version of libmysqlclient18. At the moment that was the Oracle's one. Yes, we could change our version's number to be 'later' than Oracle's, but that would turn same problems on MySQL, and

Not really. It's not "Oracle's", it is the native Debian/Ubuntu package. So if users want MariaDB, they can add our repository. If they want the official Debian/Ubuntu package, they can just not add our repository. So it makes sense that when users explicitly add the MariaDB repository, they get the MariaDB version of all the packages automatically.

would help us only temporarely - to the moment Oracle releases even later' version.

We can use epoch to ensure that our version will always be bigger than the official Debian/Ubuntu version of MySQL: http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version Something like 1:5.5.29-mariadb1~wheezy. This will always be prefered by apt-get over any official Debian package.

I didn't find anything that could affect apt-get and guys on #Debian didn't recommend anything.

I believe it works to specify desired version explicitly, as mentioned in the bug report as workaround: sudo apt-get install mariadb-server libmysqlclient18=5.5.29-mariadb1~wheezy

So for now i'd do about this: - change nothing in the existing mariadb-produced debian packages. - recommend to use 'aptitude' installing the mariadb-server on Debian.

So how do you like my proposal? Any other ideas?

I think it is better if we use the epoch to make MariaDB upgrades work automatically with both apt-get and aptitude, like they used to. Did you check how Percona handles the similar problem? - Kristian.