When I announced the MySQL Council, I said that among its roles
there is that of being a bridge between the MySQL community and
Oracle.
It has come the time where we put this role to good use.
Recently, there have been some concerns about the MySQL bugs
database, which could be summarized in Mark Callaghan's post
Where have the bugs gone?.
The gist of the concerns is that there has been a change in the
bugs handling, although we don't know what was changed and how.
In short, there has been a total lack of communication. The MySQL
Council has addressed the concerns about the public bug database
in a recent meeting, and has taken several steps, like
approaching Oracle directly, and releasing a summary of the concerns in its site.
The MySQL Council members have been discussing the decision by
Oracle, to reduce the importance of the public MySQL bug database
for providing input and direction of product updates and
direction. The Council would also like to work with Oracle to
promote communication around the status of the database access to
the broader community so members will understand what to expect
moving forward.
Without communication around the use and changes relating to the
public bug database, there have been concerns in the community
raised about duplicate bug tracking, bug numbers in commits not
being visible to the public, difficulty in offering patches into
the MySQL server, and the generalized decreased transparency in
the evolution and remediation of the MySQL server and associated
products.
The IOUG (Independent Oracle User Group) is supporting the MySQL
Council in its efforts to raise questions and query direction
from Oracle. The MySQL Council will be meeting with Oracle
stakeholders to discuss options for keeping appropriate portions
of the database active as well as communicating status and future
actions to the broader community.
We don't know the
outcome yet. But we'll surely post an update as soon as we hear
it.
Mar
08
2011