Change-to/Provide Alpine

[andrerom]

As many other official images have moved to provide alpine flavor already it would be great if mysql, mariadb and postgres did the same. But these images using debian packages probably makes that easier said than done.

[yosifkit]

Yeah, mariadb, mysql, and percona use Debian packages that are provided by upstream directly, so I think it is unwise that we provide something that they do not support.

[tanji]

I can have a look at Alpine support, will circulate this internally and let you know.

[aXe1]

There are unofficial packages (maintained by Natanael Copa, Alpine creator, AFAIK). I agree, that it's less preferable than using official package, but there are also examples of popular images, that even compile needed software. See official nginx image, for example. I think it would be great to have a choice whether to use less officially supported Alpine-based image, or not.

[yosifkit]

I think this comment is our current response. ie, we want to be sure that upstream supports running it on Alpine Linux.

I am especially hesitant with regards to the non-glibc: musl-libc, since it has caused issues in the past.

[mordant23]

@yosifkit's position is understandable. The ironic thing is that the only available MySQL package in alpine is MariaDB. The official MySQL images use oraclelinux. That makes MariaDB the best candidate for the an alpine based image for MySQL when you just need a MySQL drop in.

I created a quick and dirty alpine MariaDB image for local development and found the spin up time for local development drop to less than a second versus over 15 seconds for the Percona image using debian. The caveat is the time savings may be due to the lack of proper initialization.

[zyrill]

+1 for alpine image. All my other images are based on alpine, it's just so much more ressource efficient. I think having an "official" image without "inofficial" support is still preferable to using the image of somebody that you have to check every time. In other words: educating users that the image might misbehave and declaring it "unsupported" but still providing it is preferable to the users wandering off to some completely unofficial build with all the related security issues. It's a matter of trust IMHO.

[skwashd]

Does MariaDB providing a knowledge base article about how to build for Alpine change anything?

[zyrill]

@skwashd Yes and no: it's cool to not have to start from scratch so it's highly appreciated to have the docu but it doesn't solve the security issue I mentioned: yeah, I can build a script myself but the governance that even an unsupported official build has means it's much easier to put an image into production if it's endorsed by the original devs. The reasoning is as follows: if we use MariaDB, we trust the devs or checked the source ourselves and we trust their releases so we don't need to check every new version as vigorously. This saves resources and makes deployment processes so much easier.

[csandanov]

Meanwhile feel free to use alpine-based https://github.com/wodby/mariadb, 10.1 and 10.2 versions.

[tianon]

Just to re-summarize the current position here:

For us to move forward with Alpine variants of MariaDB within this repo, we either need upstream to start releasing explicit, supported Alpine builds of MariaDB (which would be ideal), or we need their blessing to create variants of this image which build MariaDB from source (attempting to match the compilation options of the Debian/Ubuntu-based images as closely as possible, which is going to be a slight challenge).