Monty, MySQL, and an end to the packaging nightmare

[Jeff Mitchell]

Packagers, Developers, and Diego (since I know you worked on the issues
in Gentoo),

Last night at Linuxfest Northwest I had a couple of long talks with
Monty Widenius.

One of the things I told him about was how we're using mysqle in Amarok.
 He was very surprised -- I think we're the first project he knows of
that is using it.  He was also very surprised to hear that we (and you)
were having so many issues with it, that upstream bug reports have been
ignored for six months, etc.

He *really*, *really* wants people to be using it, and doesn't want
people having all of these issues (which he wasn't aware of).  So he
made me a promise: if I collect up all of the various issues that us
developers have had using it and you packagers have had packaging it and
send the list off to them, he promised that he will have *all* of them
fixed by the end of May.

I talked to him a bit about Maya as well -- Amarok does crash, and a
backend that won't be corrupted if Amarok crashes is super important.
He said he'll make sure that it can not only be installable alongside
mysql, but that it will be able to be built such that packages can be
distributed with just the library without requiring the client and
server programs.  He'd really like to get us using it, and the crash
protection makes me think it would be really nice for us as well.
According to him, packaging it should basically be just like packaging
mysql, so existing packages should pretty much work (except that he'll
fix the various packaging bugs).  Also the API is exactly identical, so
we wouldn't have to modify any code.

So: I think we should take him up on his offer and see if he delivers.
Please send me all of the issues you can think of -- both in terms of
developing with it and packaging it, links to bug reports are bonus
points -- and once it's collected I'll send it off to him and see what
he does with it.  If things progress, we can see about switching to Maya
-- if it's really basically a drop-in replacement it shouldn't be too
difficult for any of us.

Thanks,
Jeff

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 260 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/attachments/20090426/75e3ad19/attachment.sig