Sergei Golubchik added a comment - 2017-06-29 09:25 You're using MySQLdb from stretch, and our 10.1 packages. Debian renamed the client library to libmariadbclient.so. And MySQLdb was built with that. Our 10.1 packages still use libmysqlclient, they provide libmysqlclient.so, our 10.2 packages come with MariaDB Connector/C and provide libmariadb.so (with symlinks to libmysqlclient.so). Now we need to build our packages to be compatible with stretch. This means libmariadbclient.so symlink and libmariadbclient_18 version nodes...

Niels Hendriks added a comment - 2017-06-30 08:49 - edited Hi, I'm having a similar issue, though not exactly the same. I'm using Debian 8 with MariaDB 10.2 and I see the following error: python -c "import MySQLdb" Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 19, in <module> import _mysql ImportError: libmysqlclient.so.18: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory I have the following package installed: ii libmysqlclient18 10.2.6+maria~jessie amd64 Virtual package to satisfy external depends I can see with a strace it is trying to access this file: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmysqlclient.so.18 - this file does exist, but it is a symlink: lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Jun 30 09:45 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmysqlclient.so.18 -> libmysqlclient_r.so.18.0.0 However, libmysqlclient_r.so.18.0.0 does not exist, so it is a broken symlink: file /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmysqlclient.so.18 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmysqlclient.so.18: broken symbolic link to libmysqlclient_r.so.18.0.0 As far as I can see, there is a libmariadbclient-dev package supplied by the MariaDB 10.2 repo, but this does not include the libmysqlclient libraries, only the libmariadbclient libraries. There is also a libmysqlclient-dev package but it is supplied by the Debian repo and not the MariaDB repo. This package has MySQL 5.5 dependencies so it cannot be installed together with mariadb. I have the following python-mysqldb version: apt-cache policy python-mysqldb python-mysqldb: Installed: 1.2.3-2.1 Candidate: 1.2.3-2.1 Version table: *** 1.2.3-2.1 0 500 http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Sergei Golubchik added a comment - 2017-06-30 23:18 nielsh , your issue is different. This one is about 10.1, that does not have libmariadbclient.so. Yours is about 10.2 that does not have libmysqlclient.so. This looks more like MDEV-12423 and MDEV-12889

Sergei Golubchik added a comment - 2017-09-19 16:29 Added symlinks, but not version nodes. Reopened, sorry

Otto Kekäläinen added a comment - 2019-04-02 13:52 - edited Related to this, in Debian packaging we test on every commit that this Python module compiles and works: }}   # Build a piece of software that was designed bot libmysqlclient-dev using the # libmariadb-dev-compat layer. Should always end up using libmariadb.so.3 run-time test build Python-MySQLdb with mariadbclient: stage: test quality image: debian:sid script: - cd ${WORKING_DIR} # Don't repeat this step, it's just cd ./debian/output - mkdir debug - apt-get update - apt-get install -y pkg-config ./libmariadb-dev*.deb ./libmariadb3_*.deb ./mariadb-common*.deb - pkg-config --cflags --libs mysqlclient # See what MySQLdb builds with - apt-get install -y python3-pip - pip3 install mysqlclient # Compiles module against libmysqlclient - apt-get purge -y libmariadb-dev # Not needed for run-time - python3 -c "import MySQLdb; print(MySQLdb.get_client_info())"   {{ Upstream mariadb client libs packaging has a bunch of shortcomings which I think most of are now fixed in the Debian version of MariaDB 10.3 (example: https://salsa.debian.org/mariadb-team/mariadb-10.3/commit/a02149c83bdbeab391ab331b34f28b2bf8352728 ) and I indend to upstream these into 10.4 (current development branch) this week.