mysqladmin-5.7 fails to set password for percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.6

[Dr. Jens Harbott]

I have installed percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.6 on my Xenial server and try to set the root password with mysqladmin:

# mysqladmin --user=root --password='' password 'secure'
mysqladmin: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
Warning: Since password will be sent to server in plain text, use ssl connection to ensure password safety.
mysqladmin: unable to change password; error: 'You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '() IDENTIFIED BY 'secure'' at line 1'

So it looks the version 5.7 of mysqladmin is not compatible with version 5.6 any more, but mysql-client-5.6 package has also been dropped from Xenial shortly before release.

 # apt policy mysql-client
mysql-client:
  Installed: 5.7.11-0ubuntu6
  Candidate: 5.7.11-0ubuntu6
# apt policy mysql-client-5.6
mysql-client-5.6:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
# apt policy percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.6
percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.6:
  Installed: 5.6.21-25.8-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 5.6.21-25.8-0ubuntu3

The same command still worked on Xenial Beta with mysql-client-5.6 available.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Hi,
being a universe package I think it just didn't get much attention by anybody recently.
Other than the initial contribution by Percona around Jan 2015 and some bugfixes by Canonical not a lot happened.

I think it is just time to merge some of percona upstream changes to fix that up.
It had 11 upstream Releases on the 5.6 stream since the version currently in the archive.
Since last December there also is 5.7 which already had 5 further sub-releases in the meantime.

I subscribed the Percona-Team for their guidance and support on this.