Excerpts from Otto Kekäläinen's message of 2015-04-25 23:57:50 -0700:
Hello!
Debian 8 "Jessie" has been released to today. It is the first official Debian release that ships with MariaDB (it has MariaDB 10.0.16 and MySQL 5.5.42). MariaDB client for C (the LGPL version) is also included. Release notes[1] state that in Debian 9 only one MySQL variant will be shipped. Hopefully the decision will tip towards MariaDB.
GREAT job Otto, This is really good news for Debian and for MariaDB. I wanted to just make sure to clarify something from those release notes: The actual quote from the release notes reads as such: "Only one of them is likely to be included in Debian 9" It may be a subtlety, but "will" is certain, and "likely" is not. As I've stated many times, any variant that has enough support from its community should ship. Oracle has done their part for MySQL, and you have done yours for MariaDB. Percona has also stepped up for their variants. When that line was written, it wasn't at all clear who would contribute to help all the variants play well together.
The MariaDB "request for packaging" issue[2] was opened in bugs.debian.org in 2010. I started doing MariaDB packaging for Debian in 2013. The path here has been long and I am glad that this milestone is finally reached.
Your persistence is legendary Otto. Thanks so much!