[146276] trunk/dports/databases

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Mar 6, 2016, at 1:22 PM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On 6 March 2016 at 18:01, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
>> 
>> We could remove all ports that depend on mysql4 and mysql5 exclusively or
>> via default variants. The remaining ports would then have their mysql4 or
>> mysql5 variant removed.
>> 
>> The removed ports could be brought back if someone was interested in fixing
>> them.
> 
> That would be a bit harsh, wouldn't it? I bet that a number of ports
> would work with a different database without any additional patches.
> 
> I asked long ago if someone could provide guidelines for transition,
> but nobody did. It's not clear to me what the suggested way is, so
> that we could at least make some consistent changes rather than every
> port switching to a different database with completely different code.
> 
> Mojca

The problem is that Oracle bought MySQL and took it in directions some users and developers object to. Therefore, the original developer of MySQL forked it and made MariaDB. Some distributions now default to MariaDB, and I would be in favor of MacPorts doing that too. But we should use the latest version, which is currently 10.1, in the mariadb-10.1 port. Previously we used the port name as the variant name, for example +mysql56 to enable mysql56 support. The fact that this port name contains a dash and a period is problematic in that dashes are not permitted in variant names because that conflicts with the syntax for disabling a variant, and the period is not an officially sanctioned character to use in a variant name either. Initial tests showed it seemed to work, but there are several places in the base code where variant names are validated; they all need to be changed to allow a period, if we want to use a period in the variant name. Whatever we decide should be applied consistently to all ports, so that they all have the same set of MySQL-compatible variants and all default to the same (latest stable) one. Some tickets related to these issues:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/39961

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/43431

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/46807

Bradley, can you add notes to #46807 about what you did so far?