Comment 20 for bug 1872002

To be clear:

MySQL and MariaDB remain broadly compatible. Ubuntu has maintained its status quo in defaulting to MySQL since before MariaDB existed. Users expect consistency, and this means that packages in Ubuntu should default to using MySQL over MariaDB unless the user has explicitly chosen otherwise.

If crqlog cannot work against MySQL, for example because it uses a feature of MariaDB that MySQL doesn't have or is too difficult technically to patch to use MySQL's equivalent feature instead, then that's fine - it would be appropriate then to make an exception for this package. But given how close the two forks are, and the nature of what cqrlog does, this seems unlikely to me.

If on the other hand a trivial patch could be used to maintain compatibility against both MySQL and MariaDB, then I expect developers who want to look after cqrlog in Ubuntu to write that trivial patch, send it to Debian (since MySQL is still maintained in Debian sid) and to upstream, etc. This requires investigation by an interested developer - they don't have to be upstream. Given that MySQL has become more strict about the SQL it accepts over time, it seems likely to me that this is the issue and the fix would not only work for both sides of the fork, but also be preferable for a change for upstream to accept anyway.

We should avoid going back and forth in stable releases, so the long term decision here for ongoing development and maintenance of the cqrlog package in Ubuntu should be settled _before_ making changes to the stable releases.

If as reported this hasn't worked since Ubuntu 20.04, then clearly there is no need for urgency here, and we should take the time to resolve this situation properly to give the best experience to our users in the future.

For now, then, I'm rejecting these uploads from the queue.