Thanks for the report.
10.1-10.3 are also not the latest.

I personally don't think we should provide packages for sid at all, as by doing this we acknowledge that we believe they work, while we cannot really know, because, well, it's unstable in all aspects. But as long as we claim that we provide them (and we do now, according to the configuration tool), they should be the latest.

Builds of 10.3 and 10.4 on Sid are failing, and have been for a while. Sid should not be built for 10.1-10.2 any more, because the sid repositories now come with 10.3 (I'll check to make sure builds are turned off there).

If you're interested, here's the latest 10.4 build log:
http://buildbot.askmonty.org/buildbot/builders/kvm-deb-sid-amd64/builds/8168/steps/compile/logs/stdio

I don't know why builds are failing, but as a first step I'll make sure our Sid builder is fully updated and then hand this off to a dev to look at.

> Sid should not be built for 10.1-10.2 any more, because the sid repositories now come with 10.3 (I'll check to make sure builds are turned off there).

What if one wants to run 10.1 instead of 10.3 on sid (if for example some app isn't compatible with 10.3)?

If you want to run 10.1 or 10.2 on Sid you will need to compile it manually. Trying to get 10.1 or 10.2 packages working on Sid just won't work cleanly. You'll be fighting with Apt to not auto-upgrade your packages to the 10.3 packages in the Sid repositories.

> on Sid

Note this applies to Buster too.

> You'll be fighting with Apt to not auto-upgrade your packages to the 10.3 packages in the Sid repositories.

Not really, as the version is part of the package name. apt install mariadb-server-10.1 should work just fine, even if a mariadb-server-10.3 is available too.

You are correct that if you restrict yourself to just installing the mariadb-server-10.1 package (and other mariadb-*-10.1 packages) then things could work. I was specifically thinking of the mariadb-server metapackage which always depends on the latest version.

However, for all versions of Debian and Ubuntu our policy is to not build for MariaDB versions that are lower than what can be found in the distribution repositories. And since both Buster and Sid now include MariaDB 10.3 in their repositories, that is the lowest version we will be building for them.

> I was specifically thinking of the mariadb-server metapackage which always depends on the latest version.

That'd affect 10.3 or 10.4 as well, depending on what's considered latest.

> our policy is

Fair enough, though it'd be interesting to understand the rationale for that policy.

> to not build for MariaDB versions that are lower than what can be found in the distribution repositories.

Does it make sense to build the same versions? As they should be already available..

I've managed to fix the Sid builders and I've built packages for both 10.3.13 and 10.4.3. It'll take a little bit for the packages to propagate out to all of the mirrors. But I consider this task basically complete otherwise.

To answer your most recent questions:

> That'd affect 10.3 or 10.4 as well, depending on what's considered latest.
Yes.

> it'd be interesting to understand the rationale for that policy

It basically boils down to wanting to support as many configurations as we can with finite resources. We can't support building on everything so, we do what makes the most sense. If a distro has chosen to move to only offering 10.3, we take that as a reasonable baseline, and we'll do 10.3+ there.

> Does it make sense to build the same versions? As they should be already available..

It makes perfect sense. We work with distributions to fix bugs. It'd be hard to do that if we weren't building and testing what they are shipping/supporting.