Comment 15 for bug 451801

For those of you Karmic users who, as I, cannot live without readline and don't want to wait until somebody backports the package to Karmic: What I did was to uninstall mysql-server and mysql-client and install mysql-client-5.0 mysql-server-5.0. The server will fail to downgrade, even after mysql-server-5.1 has been removed, so one has to remove /var/lib/mysql/debian-5.1.flag and run apt-get -f install to finish installation (or better, now that you know and don't have to find out for yourselves, remove the debian-5.1.flag file after removing mysql-server-5.1 and before installing mysql-server-5-0).

Now I have readline and my vi-style editing-mode again.