Discussion point: MySQL concerns, migration to MariaDB

[kestasjk]

This is more of a way to reach out / give a heads-up to devs rather than filing a bug report: MySQL 8.0 makes quite a lot of changes that break compatibility with 5.7. I've been uneasy ever since Oracle acquired it, but I thought they would just let it stagnate. Instead with 8.0 they've brought in incompatible changes, and during the migration to a new server with the latest version of Ubuntu I've had many struggles with differences that and compatibility breaks.

This post by the MariaDB lead gives a flavour of the sort of challenges with the migration to 8.0: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2018/04/congratulations-to-oracle-on-mysql-80.html

Things like changing the PASSWORD() syntax and breaking mysqldump compatibility seem to be about intentionally diverging from MariaDB. The only thing that makes this a difficult decision is that MySQL has a much larger install base than MariaDB. I considered PostgreSQL as well (phpDiplomacy was actually initially written for PostgreSQL), but our locking model and use of ENUMs would probably make that quite a difficult move.

I'm going to try a MariaDB install for our next webDiplomacy.net server and see how it goes, but I'm not as plugged in to OSS web-dev as I used to be so I'm interested in any perspectives / thoughts / objections.

Cheers,
Kestas