Norbert Tretkowski

More than seven years after I initially started the backports.org project together with Teamix, my employer at that time, it finally happened: backports.org became official last weekend, and moved to backports.debian.org! Alexander Wirt wrote a blog entry including some technical details, and there is also an official announcement on the debian-announce mailinglist. The most important point from a users perspective is to update your sources.list entry to:

deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Thanks a lot to all people who made it happen, especially Alexander Wirt and Jörg Jaspert!

OK, not really... DRBD 8.3.7 is an official part of the Linux kernel since 2.6.33, and thanks to Dann Frazier we also have a backport of that patch in Debian's 2.6.32 kernel as well.

Until yesterday, the DRBD source package in Debian built a -utils and a -source package, the latter was now dropped. From now on, users no longer need to recompile the DRBD module after a kernel upgrade.

Last month I spent two days in Belgium, after I got invited to the MySQL distro meeting. It was a non-public meeting with some people from Sun Microsystems and MySQL maintainers from different Linux distributions. It took place directly after FOSDEM (which I unfortunately could not attend due to personal reasons) at the Sun Microsystems Belgium office in Brussels. It was great to meet with Mathias Gug from the Ubuntu Server team in person. He had some really good ideas on how we could reduce the differences between MySQL in Debian and Ubuntu in the future. As a consequence, Debian will soon switch from Subversion to Bazaar for maintenance of most MySQL packages.

However, we were not only talking about the MySQL Server itself, but also about MySQL Cluster, MySQL Proxy, the MySQL Connectors and the MySQL GUI Tools. Giuseppe Maxia has a more detailed blog entry about the event, including the whole list of participants and some pictures. I fully agree with him: The meeting was a success, we also had a lot of fun, and we should do that more often!

Thanks a lot to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring, and of course to Lenz Grimmer for organizing the event.

Update: Forgot to link to the slides of the talk about MySQL in Debian that I have given at the event.

Due to a bug in britney, the Debian testing migration tool, MySQL is currently not available in testing. The issue is known and being worked on already, and it is documented in the Debian bug tracking system.

Update: Meanwhile the issue was fixed, MySQL is available in testing again.

MySQL 5.1 was uploaded to Debian unstable, and until we get it into testing, I am providing semi-official up-to-date backports of MySQL 5.1.36 and 5.0.84 for i386 and amd64 in my home directory on people.debian.org. I am providing MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 4.0 and 5.0, and MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 5.0. If you need MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 4.0 as well, please let me know.

MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 4.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.0/ etch-backports main

MySQL 5.0.84 for Debian 5.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.0/ lenny-backports main

MySQL 5.1.36 for Debian 5.0:

deb http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-dfsg-5.1/ lenny-backports main

When MySQL 5.1.36 (or newer) made it into testing, I am going to move the MySQL 5.1 backport to backports.org, where it belongs. MySQL 5.0 will then completely disappear from the development branches of Debian.

Beware that the MySQL 5.1 packages do not include MySQL Cluster support, it was dropped from MySQL 5.1 a while ago, and is now available as a separate product. Unfortunately MySQL Cluster is not yet available in Debian, packaging it is one of the big items on my TODO list.

Thanks to Christian Hammers, we finally have MySQL 5.1 in Debian unstable, which completely replaces MySQL 5.0. Please update all build-dependencies from libmysqlclient15-dev to libmysqlclient-dev and upload a rebuild version of your package.

As a positive side-effect, we no longer care about MySQL bug #41728, which was the reason why no newer version of MySQL 5.0 made it into testing since lenny got released.

Because of the latest theoretical attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm (details), I created a new OpenPGP key:

pub   4096R/2789887A 2009-05-11
   Key fingerprint = 6454 DC58 6A34 9B42 719A 1E3A 2F66 E80F 2789 887A
uid                  Norbert Tretkowski <norbert@tretkowski.de>
uid                  Norbert Tretkowski <nobse@debian.org>
sub   4096R/54CE9E32 2009-05-11


It is signed with my old key 0x0F7A8D01, uploaded to keyservers, and will replace my old key soon.

Alexander Wirt just wrote a mail to our mailinglist to announce that lenny-backports suite is ready for uploads. We will of course continue supporting etch-backports with security updates as long as etch will be supported by the Debian security team.

Happy backporting!

During the last few months I was the only person working on the MySQL packages in Debian, and I could really need some help. Currently there is MySQL 5.0.32 in etch, 5.0.51a in lenny, 5.0.75 in unstable and 5.1.31 in experimental, and I am also trying to get MySQL Cluster and MySQL Workbench into Debian. All in all it is way too much work for only one developer.

If you are an interested Debian developer/maintainer with a good knowledge in MySQL and shared library packaging, drop me a mail.

Based on the official Ubuntu 8.04 package from Sun (thanks to Alfredo Kojima) I prepared a package of MySQL Workbench 5.1.7 for Debian. I am going to upload it to experimental soon, in the meanwhile it is available (amd64 only) from here:

http://people.debian.org/~nobse/mysql-workbench-oss/

Feedback appreciated!

Last week I finally decided to try out micro-blogging using Twitter. I am not going to post much personal stuff there, but mostly technical (especially Debian and MySQL related) stuff, here are my updates.

The MySQL packages in Debian still do not (and will never) include inofficial feature patches (beside the redirect output of error.log to syslog in MySQL 5.0, which is now part of the official MySQL 5.1 releases) like the ones from Percona or Google. Of course we add important bugfixes from newer (not yet released) versions of MySQL, but no feature patches.

If you are interested in a patched version of the Debian MySQL packages, take a look at OurDelta, their builds include patches (complete list) like mirrored binlog and InnoDB freeze. Upgrading from the official Debian packages of MySQL to the builds from OurDelta should work without problems, but please use Launchpad when reporting bugs against their packages, and not the Debian Bug Tracking System.

This week MySQL released version 5.0.75 of their Community Edition. The package in testing is in good shape, so I had time to prepare and upload 5.0.75-1 to unstable, but it should work on testing as well. I also made a rebuild for etch, which is available here.

In the next upload of MySQL 5.1.30 to the experimental branch of Debian we are going to drop MySQL Cluster support from the standard MySQL packages. I already wrote something about the future of MySQL Cluster in Debian a while ago, this is just the first step towards a separate mysql-cluster package in Debian.

This change does not (and will never) affect the MySQL packages in etch and lenny, and unstable not until we decide to move MySQL 5.1 from experimental to unstable.

Yesterday I visited the MySQL Customer Conference in Munich, as I did last year. The agenda was quite similar to last year's agenda, but I was really surprised how much Sun hardware and software products were integrated (forced?) into most of the not so technical talks.

All in all the conference was okay, but not as good as last year.