When installing MariaDB as a normal user, mysql_secure_installation fails when attempting to authenticate the root user (with an empty password).

This can be worked around by updating the make_config function to avoid writing the user and password lines if the provided root password is empty, as in the following alternate implementation (first if-statement added):

make_config() {

    echo "# mysql_secure_installation config file" >$config

    echo "[mysql]" >>$config

    if [ ! -z "$rootpass" ]; then

        echo "user=root" >>$config

        esc_pass=`basic_single_escape "$rootpass"`

        echo "password='$esc_pass'" >>$config

    fi

    #sed 's,^,> ,' < $config  # Debugging

    if test -n "$defaults_file"

    then

        dfile=`parse_arg "$defaults_file"`

        cat "$dfile" >>$config

    fi

}

I'm not sure if this is the proper fix, but hopefully it at least highlights where the conflict is happening.