Hello! > For me, this whole situation seems wrong though. Why do you have > versioned package names (mariadb-server-*) when they are all mutually > exclusive with one another due to all shipping the same binary?
This is how the MySQL packaging has been structured for the past 10 years or so. There was probably some use case that users wanted to stick to a certain major release by installing e.g. 'mysql-server-5.1' while installing 'mysql-server' would just auto-upgrade the major version on dist-upgrade. I don't know for sure, this predates me by years. I'd rather not start changing it now due to the potential unknown and hard to revert consequences it could have to users. I did however a couple years ago remove the versions from the plugin package names, so the issue is at least limited to server and client packages. For the record, I solved the original issue already using the 'apt install --with-source ./Packages -s' technique.