Distributions from the view of a package
Channel: FOSDEM
Date: 10/03/2018

by Colin Charles

At: FOSDEM 2017

Having spent more than the last decade being the main point of contact fordistributions shipping MySQL, then MariaDB Server, it's clear that workingwith distributions have many challenges. Licensing changes (when MySQL movedthe client libraries from LGPL to GPL with a FOSS Exception), ABI changes,speed (or lack thereof) of distribution releases/freezes, supporting thesoftware throughout the lifespan of the distribution, specific bugs due toplatforms, and a lot more will be discussed in this talk. Let's not forget thepolitics. How do we decide "tiers" of importance for distributions? As abonus, there will be a focus on how much effort it took to "replace" MySQLwith MariaDB.

Having spent more than the last decade being the main point of contact fordistributions shipping MySQL, then MariaDB Server, it's clear that workingwith distributions have many challenges. Licensing changes (when MySQL movedthe client libraries from LGPL to GPL with a FOSS Exception), ABI changes,speed (or lack thereof) of distribution releases/freezes, supporting thesoftware throughout the lifespan of the distribution, specific bugs due toplatforms, and a lot more will be discussed in this talk. Let's not forget thepolitics. How do we decide "tiers" of importance for distributions? As abonus, there will be a focus on how much effort it took to "replace" MySQLwith MariaDB.

Benefits: if you're making a distribution, this is the point of view of theupstream package makers. Why are distribution statistics important to us? Dowe monitor your bugs system or do you have a better escalation to us? How dowe test to make sure things are going well before release. This and more willbe spoken about.

As an upstream project (package), we love nothing more than being availableeverywhere. But time and energy goes into making this is so as there arequirks in every distribution.


Room: K.4.601
Scheduled start: 2017-02-04 16:30:00