Raising priority since this is becoming critical for projects depending on the development package (which requires the common package) like the MaxScale -project.

The idea is to move perror to MariaDB-client, and error messages to MariaDB-common.

Anything else? move libmysqld.so to a separate package, perhaps? It would mean splitting MariaDB-server in three packages: server-mysqld, server-embedded, server-common.

For MaxScale:

There should be a new "MariaDB-server-embedded" package with only the libmysqld.so.18 file. The libmysqld.so symlink should be moved to a new "MariaDB-server-embedded-devel" package or into the devel package. The files such as the errmsg.sys files should be moved to for example a new "MariaDB-common" package. Then the MariaDB-server, MariaDB-shared(client libs) and MariaDB-server-embedded packages should require the new "MariaDB-common" package and can be installed all at once or just any of them.

And, when you build the new maxscale package it would have buildrequires on MariaDB-server-embedded, MariaDB-server-embedded-devel, MariaDB-devel and MariaDB-common and a runtime dependancy on MariaDB-server-embedded and MariaDB-common.

When installing maxscale it would pull in MariaDB-server-embedded and MariaDB-common and nothing else.

I don't like very fine-grained packages, it's too confusing for end users.

Both -devel and -embedded-devel need header files. So there must be -devel-common with headers, -devel with libmysqlclient.a and -embedded-devel with libmysqld.a. I consider it too complex, I'd rather put all that in one -devel package.

It's the same for the server. Both mysqld binary and libmysqld.so embedded server library can create table files (e.g. MYD/MYI files), load plugins, etc. So both servers need plugins, utility tools to work with these tables, etc. So there must be -server, -embedded-server, and -server-common packages. Again, I consider it too complex, I'd rather put all that in one -server package.

Difficulty in specifying the need is the fact that we don't know what conflicts there might be in a host where may be multiple existing MariaDB/MySQL installations prior to installation of application using embedded server.

Whatever the solution will be, it should allow for installing everything into users-specified directory. It should be possible to install and use the libmysqld so that it doesn't cause conflict between its own errmsg.sys and any previously existing error file.

From MaxScale point of view the fix may be suspended until we can confirm what is possible and how it could be achieved.