Hi,

Could you please elaborate on it – why should the package require percona-xtrabackup?
Is it for SST via xtrabackup? But then, there are other methods which many people prefer, and xtrabackup is not a default one.
Or is there any other reason why it is required?

The documented way to do SST is using xtrabackup: http://www.codership.com/wiki/doku.php?id=mysql_galera_configuration and that doesn't work without that percona-xtrabackup. It was pointed out to me on IRC after I filed this that it's not required for other SST methods.

Perhaps this is only a documentation issue?

Actually, I don't even see much of a documented issue there, it's just an example of my.cnf file. There is a section which lists mandatory values, and it's called this way, but it's not about wsrep_sst_method, it can be different in your real configuration just as much as all other options (addresses, login/password, etc.) can.

Further on the same page you can find the section wsrep_sst_method
http://www.codership.com/wiki/doku.php?id=mysql_galera_configuration#wsrep_sst_method

which redirects you to http://www.codership.com/wiki/doku.php?id=sst_mysql which describes possible values in more details.

But thinking about it, I agree it should be mentioned that xtrabackup is actually a separate product and needs to be installed (as well as rsync, for that matter).

Seppo,

Could you please consider updating documentation pages mentioned above to point out that xtrabackup is a separate product and needs to be installed in order to be used as an SST method?