Hi Vicentiu, I read through your proposal for how to handle MariaDB bintars. I know a lot of the old history on this (like from working in the MySQL build team back in 2005), I also know first-hand of the tough spot between what people think is "easily possible" and the practicalities of packaging for real linux systems. So I hope my input can be useful in some way: 1. To me, providing bintars is not important. Nor is providing any binaries for that matter. MariaDB is open source, the most important thing is it is easy to compile. Others can provide binaries as needed, and in fact distros are already doing so very well. So I personally am fine with not releasing bintars going forward. I know binaries are considered important by others. 2. I agree a clear definition is lacking of exactly what binaries should be/provide. My opinion for bintars is that they are a way to use MariaDB easily similar to compiling the source, but without the need for having installed a compiler toolchain. So bintars should be the result of a mostly default compile of the source, on a stable/oldstable linux distro like Debian or some redhat with minimal optional dependencies installed. Most work should go into making default compile do the right thing, as opposed to endless tweaking in build scripts or Buildbot for how bintars are compiled. 3. In your proposal, I think there is too much focus (out of good intentions, I'm sure) about solving all possible problems. No install method is perfect for all use cases. Bintars provide very simple install or even easy-of-use without installing, but they have other limitations. Let us not try to make bintars "perfect". Rather make them simple to produce, and simple to use in the limited scenarious where they can work well. 4. Let us firmly give up on building static binaries. Static binaries do not work well, and have not done so in many years. Here is a reference for a problem with linking libc statically: https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/FAQ#Even_statically_linked_programs_need_s... And mixing static and dynamic linking creates some very serious problems, see MDEV-32251 and MDEV-25633. We should just build a default `cmake` binary with dynamic linking against the required library dependencies, do the build on a minimal linux where most optional dependencies are not installed. This will then work well on user's systems that have compatible libraries. On systems that have not, there are other options for running MariaDB. 5. I think we should _definitely_ not maintain an infrastructure for building our own static versions of various system libraries / 3rd-party libraries, see also (4). 6. I agree with concerns about too much effort needed to maintain bintars for many years. Let us be pragmatic, make things simple, and only do what can be done with small amount of effort. Build the bintars on stable linux systems for compatibility, and use default installs as much as possible for simplicity. When those systems become too old to easily continue building bintars, just stop building them. Existing users can easily transition to compiling themselves if they really need, thanks to (2); or use another of the different options available for running MariaDB. And finally Vicentiu, let me commend you for taking responsibility of the task of producing bintars and working so constructively on getting to a working result. It is a task the difficulty of which is easily underappreciated. So these are my opinions and suggestions, hope this helps. - Kristian.