Otto Kekäläinen

All about MariaDB packaging in two of the most widely-used Linux distros, Debian and Ubuntu, including the strict requirements demanded by distros, and the impact on fixing bugs “upstream” in MariaDB itself.

MariaDB has now reached the 6th major release since the original authors of MySQL started taking the code base in another direction than where MySQL is going under Oracle's ownership. Today MariaDB has many more features than Oracle MySQL and it is the default MySQL variant in Debian. This presentation covers what new features landed in MariaDB 10.5 and also touches on how the long existing features have evolved to today, and naturally what is their state and best practices for Debian users. MariaDB has also built-in support for Galera master-master replication and Galera 4 has recently landed in Debian, so it will also be covered. At the end of the presentation there is also a chance to discuss the state of the Debian packaging with the packagers of MariaDB, Galera etc al in Debian.

Currently Salsa admin and the Salsa-CI team are two separate groups with no overlap. In this session we could discuss how these teams could collaborate in the future, and in general check how well aligned the interests and goals of these teams are. Salsa as git hosting and Salsa-CI as quality control is a great combo that helps a lot of Debian Developers to save time on change managements / regression testing and thus empowers them to do more truly productive work to help Debian.

MariaDB is a large package with many parallel releases maintained, extensively used libraries and the packages carry along a data directory that needs to stay intact upgrade after upgrade. Packaging MariaDB is a complex task and ensuring smooth upgrades and avoiding regressions requires a lot of work. However, with the introduction of Salsa, the Debian Gitlab service, and the continuous integration system it includes, every commit in MariaDB packaging is nowadays extensively tested and maintaining high quality is significantly easier. In this talk I explain how Salsa-CI works in general, how it is applied for MariaDB packaging in Debian, and how the testing system has evolved in the past year and how it has proven itself truly priceless.

MariaDB is currently quite stable in Debian and we should have a fairly good opportunity to work on adding new features and capabilities related to MariaDB & co packaging in Debian. Attend this BoF session and express your needs and wishes, or get to know the current maintainers and get help on how to contribute to MariaDB & tools packaging in Debian.

Join the maintainers of MariaDB and MySQL in Debian to discuss current state of how the SQL database servers, connectors, clustering tools and other related software is packaged, shipped and automatically tested, installed or upgraded in Debian. If you are interested in joining the MariaDB/MySQL packaging team, this is the place to meet current maintainers and get introduced to the current packaging efforts. If you just want to occasionally contribute, this is the place to share your plans and ideas to they can be refined together.

BoF session for people interested in MariaDB/MySQL in Debian. Discussion according to what the attendees want to talk about. Hosted by members from the pkg-mysql-maint team.

In this talk I'll explain how socket authentication in MariaDB works and how it makes the life of system administrators easier when they can do all maintenance as root, without the need of additional passwords. Life without extra passwords is also more secure, as there is less to leak or loose. Socket authentication in MariaDB is by default enabled in Debian.

At the end of 2011 FSFE started monitoring all IT related public procurement notices in Finland, searching of violations of the procurement law, specifically cases where the procurement notices ask for a specific brand or product, thus discriminating free competition.

The most common example would be a government or municipality office seeking to renew their Microsoft licences, and therefore release a call for tenders for Microsoft licenses, effectively restricting tenderers to Microsoft resellers, discriminating any other operating system vendors.

Publishing calls for tenders that restrict the offering to a specific brand or product is illegal in all of the EU countries. With these actions FSFE seeks to develop an EU-wide procurement monitoring effort, that will eventually lead to free competition, and as Free Software is superior in most cases, it will lead to significant increase in Free Software usage in the public sector.

In this talk the team coordinator Otto Kekäläinen will tell about the efforts motivations, the latest news about how the effort is going on and what impact it has had. PR about the effort: http://fsfe.org/news/2012/news-20120619-01