maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

MARK CALLAGHAN <mdcallag@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Define "properly"? I suspect you mean that you want us to spend the
> time to get our changes into MariaDB.

No, that is not what I meant. I meant write code, tests, etc. like what you
and I want to see in the MySQL source. You have often voiced opinions on
quality of code, tests, etc., and I believe we think very much alike in this
respect.

The concrete example was extending the alter table API to better support
online schema changes. When we did this at MySQL for online add column in NDB
Cluster, we designed it as a general extension to the storage engine API, not
as some special case. I think this is what everyone would expect from MySQL
sources.

But doing such features in a general way, thinking about all use cases and
corner cases, can be _much_ more work than making something work well for a
given problem at hand. I fully understand the temptation, or even need, to
solve the smaller problem instead.

My motivation is that I want to see the MySQL source base (under whatever
name), see revolutionary improvements long-term. I want to see full parallel
replication working with any engine that implements the necessary storage
engine API. I want to see a good backup solution that works with different
engines. I want to see replication that recovers reliably from crashes and has
robust and easy master promotion capabilities. Etc.

And I believe to get this we will need not just to add isolated features
(whether as individual patches or collected in bzr branches); we will also
eventually have to evolve the storage engine API, add new plugin interfaces,
etc. That is a lot of work, which is hard to justify for an individual
MySQL-using organisation. So I want to encourage everyone to participate in
this who might be able to.

 - Kristian.