jcole’s weblog

In the past few days, MySQL Community 5.0.41 was released. While reading through the changelog, I noticed the following entry:

The patches for Bug #19370 and Bug #21789 were reverted.

Upon looking at Bug #21789, I noted that it was originally committed in MySQL Enterprise 5.0.32, released December 20th, 2006. The next community release which would have contained the patch is MySQL Community 5.0.33, released January 9th, 2007. This means that not only was the patch not vetted by the community, but there was a full 20 days between the enterprise release with the patch, and the next community release which contained it. According to MySQL’s release process, it could have been a full 5 months, given the right timing…

The patches were rolled back in MySQL Enterprise 5.0.40, released April 17th, 2007. Yes, the patch was committed without much vetting, and then had to be rolled back, 118 days later, in the “enterprise” version of MySQL. Why?

Back when MySQL first polled me about the community/enterprise split, I told them that this would happen. The reason it happened, of course, is that MySQL willingly shut down its only avenue for vetting these sorts of patches. They made a similar split to RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) vs. Fedora Core Linux, but for some reason broke the process at the same time: they produce releases of community much less often than enterprise. That means that nobody in the community is testing the features that they stick in enterprise. They just get pushed out with no public vetting.

The way that RHEL and Fedora work is that all the shiny new stuff is pushed into Fedora first. After it has been deemed that the Fedora process, plus plenty of internal vetting, has been successful, those patches or new versions are merged into RHEL either for the next patchset, or the next full release. This, of course, means that Fedora is always ahead of RHEL. That’s exactly the idea. RedHat is betting that enterprise users (whatever that really means, these days) want a stable slowly-moving release that is “guaranteed” to work, and easy to keep up with.

On the flip side, Fedora is great for users who want the latest and greatest all the time—primarily desktop users and developers—people who are willing to work through the quirks and contribute a bit back in the way of feedback. People that like to run yum update a couple times a week. What do they get in return? A (usually) good product that is completely free.

Why did MySQL reverse the process and make it (in my opinion) useless? I suspect their sales team thinks it would look bad if the community users “get more” than the enterprise ones. But, take a look at the MySQL releases themselves, discounting any other “features”—which are debatable—that you receive with MySQL Enterprise. Why would I pay to get a release with the same unvetted, broken, may-be-rolled-back patches as everyone else gets? Why would I suggest that our customers pay?