Re: Your tips to MariaDB?

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Robert Silén <robert.silen%mariadb.org@localhost> writes:

> Hello package maintainers at pkgsrc,
>
> Thank you for your work with pkgsrc. We are reaching out to package
> maintainers from MariaDB Foundation to inquire if you are content with
> MariaDB. Do you have any tips or feedback on how we at the Foundation could
> support effective or better packaging of MariaDB?
>
> Thank you for taking the time to reply!
>
> Best regards,
> Robert Silén

You have reached the pkgsrc users list, which is what MAINTAINER= when
there is no specific person maintainging a package.  (That's totally
fine.)

I am not an expert in using MariaDB or packaging it, but I looked over
the package and have a few comments.

A meta-comment is that you could check out pkgsrc and read the control
files for mariadb.  Part of that content is working around issues of
various sorts, and those could be viewed as bugs and fixed.

  https://www.pkgsrc.org/#index3h2

Things that would be nice:

  - Allow building client and server separately.  It's ok for the server
    build to expect the client part to be built and installed.
    Packaging systems want these separate, as many uses involves only
    client libs on some machine.   You may be expecting typical
    GNU/Linux packaging where the package is expected to build
    everything and then assign files to split packages.  pkgsrc isn't
    like that; each pacakge is built separately.   This is more or less
    necessary for a packaging system that allows users to build
    packages, as it enables not building the server if you don't need
    it.  More importantly (in the general case) it enables not building
    the extra prerequesite packages e.g. for the server.

  - It seems that some shell scripts have a bash #! line.  Perhaps they
    even have non-POSIX syntax.  Instead, use #!/bin/sh, and write in
    POSIX shell.

  - In all shell scripts, do not use "test ==".  This is not legal per
    POSIX, and is a bashism.

  - Don't special-case APPLE.   If mariadb is being built as a mac app,
    that's fine, but if it is just the that mostly-POSIXy computer one
    is using is APPLE, that's not a reason to do things differently
    (other than handling Apple's odd shlibs).

  - There are a lot of patches.  A lot of these can likely mostly be
    viewed as bugs and applied upstream.  Some I have commented on.  I
    view this not so much as "accommodating NetBSD or pkgsrc" as "making
    the code more portable" although likely there is a little of the
    former.

  - There are things in the Makefile.common which are like patches.


Another thing that would be great is to have upstream build and test on
NetBSD, and particularly on some less common CPU architectures.  Or the
illumos family, which pkgsrc also supports.  Even better to run CI on
it.

Probably others will have comments too.

Greg