I am by no means an expert but I did not uninstall mySQL, just
added  the following to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://mirror2.hs-esslingen.de/mariadb/repo/5.5/debian wheezy main       
deb-src http://mirror2.hs-esslingen.de/mariadb/repo/5.5/debian wheezy main
(I run Wheezy in production now, there are several mirrors to pick from)
Then aptitude update;aptitude safe-upgrade -y and so on
and then
aptitude install mariadb-server-5.5   and after that                                     
aptitude install libmariadbclient-dev

That pretty much took care of things, the applications should not really notice
the switch. I am still investigating one minor issue after the change, probably
unrelated,  but otherwise everything is running as before (or faster)

Hope this is any good to you.  Suppose there is no official package for sid so you're
out in the wild although the Debian 'testing' packages usually work. 
Karl-L. Rumpf
klrumpf@gmail.com
Málaga, Spain

On 16/11/12 22:46, Daniel Bartholomew wrote: 
The following question has been posted to the Knowledgebase:

https://kb.askmonty.org/en/drop-in-replacement-on-debian/
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Is there a way to make MariaDB install over MySQL on a Debian machine?
I have my puppet master, which is running Debian/sid. It has
puppet-dashboard, which utilizes MySQL 5.5.28. Much to my dismay, I am
unable to install MariaDB over it:

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The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libmariadbclient18 : Depends: libmysqlclient18
   (= 5.5.28-mariadb1~wheezy) but 5.5.28+dfsg-1 is to be installed

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
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But if I try to uninstall the parts of MySQL, then apt wishes to
uninstall everything, up to and including puppet-dashboard:


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The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer
required:
  dbconfig-common libaio1 libhttpclient-ruby1.8
  mysql-server-core-5.5 rake ruby-dbi ruby-deprecated unzip zip
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libdbd-mysql-perl libdbd-mysql-ruby libmysqlclient18 mysql-client
  mysql-client-5.5 mysql-server mysql-server-5.5 puppet-dashboard
  ruby-dbd-mysql ruby-mysql
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This is unacceptable for a live box... Is there something else I can do
to make the install less painful?
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Thanks.