I've submitted a pull request (https://code.launchpad.net/~mcoleman/maria/maria-fix-bug5190/+merge/194226) in LaunchPad to resolve this issue. The pull request resolves fresh installation of MariaDB; in order to resolve dependency issues with packages that explicitly depend on MySQL, I have created a new source package, maria-compat (https://code.launchpad.net/~mcoleman/maria/maria-compat), which creates libmysqlclient18, mysql-client, and mysql-server packages for a temporary workaround until one of the two permanent solutions (or both) is implemented:
1. work with the Debian/Ubuntu distribution maintainers and try to come up with a way to manage conflicting database engines, similar to (or maybe integrated into) the update-alternatives system
2. reach out to the projects that explicitly depend on MySQL packages and request that they update their dependencies for compatibility with MariaDB (ie. changing "Depends: libmysqlclient18" to "Depends: libmariadbclient18 | libmysqlclient18")

I will look into this issue.. thank you very much for reporting it!

Obviously we want the user experience to be great on Debian and Ubuntu.

Re-assigned to Otto

its a pretty serious issue and make me not want to use mariadb's repo in a production environment with replication. Its to much downtime if an apt-get upgrade would uninstall the master mysql server.

mcoleman and stefane : Work is in progress to make official Debian packages. There are lots of changes regarding the packaging and I expect that the issues here will be also solved as original libmysqlclient18 and new libmariadbclient18 will co-exsist properly in Debian main. Instead of update-alternatives we are using virtual package Provides "virtual-mysql".

Please take a look at https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/MySQL/MariaDBPlan

If you can help with testing, that would be great! Reports about official packaging can be sent to pkg-mysql-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org

I will close this issue once the packages hit Debian proper and/or the new contents of debian/* is merged to replace current bzr:mariadb-5.5/debian/*

The bug report is actually quite vague on what the actual problem is, how to reproduce it etc. Unless somebody points out a concrete scenario that fails (hopefully along with copy-pasted "screenshot" of the terminal) I will close this issue soon.

It's not a bug in itself (not big enough for epic, but it should be a task, I'll move it now), that's why it has no description of the problem. It was created because it some point the number of various flavors of installation problems started getting out of hand, we needed some way to link them together and see them as a whole.

It can be closed when the linked issues are closed, see the section "Issue Links". Or, if you so prefer, you can close it now, there aren't so many left, so they can be tracked individually if they're still relevant, which is unlikely.

All of the subtasks have been closed, and upstreaming packaging changes is progressing and tracked in other issues eg

https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-6284
https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-8375
https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-14900