Saturday, March 30, 2019

On References to MariaDB and MariaDB Bugs (MDEVs) in MySQL Bug Reports

Recently I noted that some of my comments to public MySQL bug reports got hidden by somebody from Oracle with privileges to do so. I was not able to find out who did that and when, as this information is not communicated to bug subscribers (this may change if my feature requests, Bug #94807 - "Subscriber should be notified when comment is made private", is eventually implemented).

When it happened for the first time I thought it was probably non-intentional. When it happened for a second time I complained with a tweet that got few likes and zero comments. Recently this happened again and yet another tweet had not got much attention, but at least I've got a comment via Bug #94797 that my comment there (where I checked test case on MariaDB version I had at hand to find out it's not affected, something I often do for bugs mentioned in my blog posts here) was hidden as irrelevant and "an attempt to advertise MariaDB".

Snow hides everything, good and bad, dog shit, holes in the road and autumn flowers... Do we really want information provided in comments to public MySQL bugs got hidden just because someone once decided it's "bad"?
I really wonder if any of my readers think that I advertise MariaDB with my public posts or public comments anywhere or specifically in MySQL bug reports?

I'd also like to share here, where no one besides me can hide or delete comments (I hope), what was hidden in the case that caused me to tweet about censorship I have to deal with. In Bug #94610 - "Server stalls because ALTER TABLE on partitioned table holds dict mutex" that ended up as "Not a Bug" (not even a duplicate of a verified Bug #83435 - "ALTER TABLE is very slow when using PARTITIONED table" it referred to and extended with a global mutex usage highlighted and impact explained), I've added the following comment:
"[12 Mar 7:30] Valeriy Kravchuk
Not only it stalls, but if it stalls for long enough time it will crash :)

Useful related reading is here: https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-15641
"
The comment was hidden very soon. Now, if you check that link, you'll see confirmed, unresolved MariaDB bug report. I mostly had this comment to the MDEV-15641 in mind, were my colleague and well known InnoDB developer Marko Mäkelä stated:
"The row_log_table_apply() is actually invoked while holding both dict_sys->mutex and dict_operation_lock. If there is a lot of log to apply, this may actually cause InnoDB to crash."
I may be mistaking in linking these two bug reports together, but isn't highlighting the possibility of crash due to long semaphore wait important to understand the impact of the bug report and triage it properly? What wrong MySQL users and bug report readers may see if they follow the link to MariaDB bug I considered relevant? What was advertised by this comment that is harmful or useless for MySQL Community?

I was even more surprised by these recent actions on my comments because in the past I had never noted similar approach. Check the following bug reports, for example (I searched for those with "MDEV" and "Kravchuk" in them to get these):
  • Bug #80919 - "MySQL Crashes when Droping Indexes - Long semaphore wait". In this bug report (real bug fixed in 5.7.22) I've added a comment that refers to MDEV-14637. The comment still remains public and, IMHO, is still useful. Providing this link helped to get proper attention to the bug, so it was re-opened and got comments from Oracle engineers finally. Was it an attempt to advertise MariaDB? How this case is different from my comment in Bug #94610 quoted above? 
  • Bug #84185 - "Not all "Statements writing to a table with an auto-increment..." are unsafe". I reported this "upstream" MySQL bug based on MDEV-10170 - "Misleading "Statements writing to a table with an auto-increment column after selecting from another table are unsafe" on DELETE ... SELECT", previously found by my colleague Hartmut Holzgraefe. I've also added link to the "upstream" MySQL bug report to that MDEV. Does anybody in MySQL or MariaDB user communities think that such cross-references are useless, harmful or may be considered as and "attempt to advertise competitor" if any of vendors fixes the bug first?
  • Bug #48392 - "mysql_upgrade improperly escapes passwords with single quotes". I verified this bug in 2009 while working for MySQL at Sun, and it still remains "Verified" (I had not re-checked if it's still repeatable with current MySQL versions). Then in 2013 community user added a comment referring to the MariaDB bug, MDEV-4664 - "mysql_upgrade crashes if root's password contains an apostrophe/single quotation mark" that was fixed later, in 2015. This comment still remains public and is useful!
So, had my comments that mention MDEVs or MariaDB in general became so irrelevant and MariaDB advertising recently comparing to the previous ones? What exact community standards or rules they break? Is it now forbidden to any user of MySQL bugs database to mention MariaDB or bugs in it, use MariaDB in tests to make some point and share the results in public in MySQL bugs database, or the problem is with me personally doing this?

I'd be happy to read explanations or opinions from MySQL community users and my former Oracle colleagues in comments to this blog post.

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