Hi,

While I don't see any previous traffic on the matter, it's exactly what's intended for this list I believe. I'd love to hear from both MySQL folk as well as other distro packagers on the matter.

I'm the Gentoo package mantainer for MySQL (I started the Gentoo MySQL herd, and it temporarily had two other maintainers, but I'm back doing it now again). I've been using MySQL for nearly 8 years - I applied for and was granted an educational use license (3.20-3.22) before MySQL went GPL. I was also one of the phpMyAdmin developers, now retired from that project. Additionally, work with MySQL is an important part of my salaried job as well as my consulting.

In the beginning, before the community and enterprise versions split, it was simple, Gentoo simply provided 'dev-db/mysql'.

Then the split happened, and we added 'dev-db/mysql-community' to the tree, while the main 'dev-db/mysql' followed the Enterprise source releases. This allowed folk to just upgrade into the enterprise version, which had better support in terms of bug-fixes actually getting out to users than the Community version.

Now that Enterprise source has gone closed (but not missing), and Gentoo is faced with a difficult decision. - Do we respect the wishes of MySQL AB, and only package the community sources, dropping ES entirely? This would hurt any commercial Enterprise users on Gentoo. - Do we listen to the users that want bugfixes, and package the tarballs from DorsalSource? - We could do what Dorsal is doing in simply waiting until the MySQL developers tag the release in BitKeeper, and roll our own tarballs (Gentoo already does this for some other upstream codebases). - Make a new package, dev-db/mysql-dorsal, retire the old dev-db/mysql, and FORCE users to migrate to one of community or dorsal (such an approach will NOT be popular for any distribution).

I originally applauded the concept behind the community/enterprise split, but I'm afraid that it did not pan out anywhere near as well as I'd hoped.

The Changelog for ES 5.0.48 (http://www.mysql.org/doc/refman/5.0/en/releasenotes-es-5-0-48.html) lists fixes for issues that I'm certain I'v seen in production. Migrating from an older enterprise to community seems irresponsible in that regard - let along telling a client that the fix for the issue that is affecting him won't be available until the next community release.

The release schedule for CS thus far has been: 5.0.45 - 04 Jul 2007 (2007-185) = 64 days 5.0.41 - 01 May 2007 (2007-121) = 63 days 5.0.37 - 27 Feb 2007 (2007-058) = 49 days 5.0.33 - 09 Jan 2007 (2007-009) = 80 days 5.0.27 - 21 Oct 2006 (2006-294) Average of 64 days between releases, however 67 days have passed since the last community release, and I don't know when the next community release will be. The BK commitlog shows nothing for the last 10 weeks (http://mysql.bkbits.net:8080/mysql-5.0-community/?DATE=-12w..&PAGE=changes).

Distros are also in an interesting position, that we expect users to report bugs to us before taking them to the upstream (some upstream projects won't even take bug reports from Joe Random Gentoo User - they want it to come from a Gentoo Developer after it's been verified). This is intended to weed out problems with how the distro has packaged MySQL, as well as users with broken systems (bad RAM/PSU turns up far too often in Gentoo) and those that need a little helping hand with a Clue-by-four.

So what do we do? Responses, kudos, flames, I want to hear it all.