On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 05:57:47PM +0200, Colin Charles wrote:

I'd call that overly optimistic, when they can bill for more time deploying Nagios etc instead of MySQL Enterprise Monitor (EM), and integrate the rest of the clients needs with Nagios better, rather than trying to integrate with the unknown of EM. I haven't seen ANY documentation on EM anywhere on dev.mysql.com/doc/ - there are a couple of articles, but nothing to build ground-level support to encourage users to look at EM.

And which set of those users is more likely to convert to the paid Enterprise version? I'd say neither.

Aside from the possible maintainer load (human reasons) and contractual obligations (legal reasons), there is no technical reason stopping distributions from shipping both CS & ES as Gentoo does.

For distributions with good build and packaging systems, I'm reasonably certain that the maintainer load for building isn't overly high either. I was the sole Gentoo maintainer of MySQL for 2 years (2003-2005), and then the backup for two years while we had two other developers with a stronger MySQL interest (and I had other things going on), but the past 6 months, I've been back as the sole maintainer, as they had other things now. The package maintenance requirements for MySQL are considerably lower than some of the other packages I maintain, thanks to a large (but not quite perfect) testsuite.

The Gentoo ebuilds for ES vs. CS have a very large degree of common code (in mysql.eclass), and the only unique code per version is specific disabling of broken test cases (Some versions have NDB that doesn't like the sandbox for example). I put two hours in prepping the latest MySQL releases in Gentoo the other evening, and that got me the latest 5.0 enterprise and 5.1 beta, on 3 architectures. I have NOT pushed them to the main tree yet, pending the outcome of this discussion, and me tracing the one test failure of mysqlclient.

Making choices to lessen your non-paid support load was the idea here.

And next time the tree gets a fix (specifically one that might be important to some user, but isn't an issue for many other users), say a week after the CS version is released, that means 80+ days to wait for the next quarterly release while putting up with the bug.

Is it MySQL's hope that the user is sufficiently pissed off that they will pay (for Enterprise) to get the fix, while not resourceful enough to get the changeset and apply it themselves?

He responded to Kaj's post on "Communication Challenges" http://www.planetmysql.org/kaj/?p=124#comment-18318