In a sense, it's correct. Because dialog.so plugin is loaded by libmysqlclient.so, so they're packaged together.

But client tools from MariaDB-client are linked with libmysqlclient.a statically. That's why they work and don't require MariaDB-shared.

I see two possible fixes for this:

1. move client plugins to a separate package, and both MariaDB-client and MariaDB-shared will require it
2. link command-line clients dynamically with libmysqlclient.so (it's MDEV-290)

I'd generally prefer the second solution, many fine-grained packages are, in my opinion, confusing for users, and linking dynamically is just The Right Thing.

Dynamic linking sounds fine to me. Just ad 1) that separate package could be MariaDB-common, right?

MariaDB-common is for files that are used both by the client and the server. So far I believed that client-side plugins are only used by the client. But now I'm thinking that in replication a server just might need them too. I'll see if that's right, and if yes — sure, I'll move client plugins to MariaDB-common.

Honza Horak, do I need to set obsoletes/conflicts somehow when moving files between packages? like new -common conflicts with the old -shared, or something like that?

Yey, so big delay.. I don't think any obsoletes/conflicts changes are necessary in this case, the only important thing here are the Requires from -server and other packages, so all the packages have all necessary pieces installed if needed.

Ok, fixed.

I've only fixed RPMs, because DEBs are much more fragile and I don't want to break them. We will do this fix in DEB packages later, after MDEV-3809