Confusing state of Percona Software Repositories (apt)

MySQL & MariaDB Percona Server for MySQL 8.0
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Honestly, I find the current state of Percona Software repositories for apt tremendously confusing (not sure if the state of rpm repositories is the same):

  • The documentation ( MySQL software repositories - Percona Software Repositories ) lists “MySQL software repositories” and repositories for “Percona Distribution for MySQL” - tbh I don’t understand which of the two “classes” of repos is recommended if I want to install the percona’s mysql on a production server. What is actually the difference?
  • When trying to choose pdps-8.0 on trixie, it tells me this operating is not supported, but on bookworm it works fine
  • ps-80 on the other hand works on both trixie and bookworm, but as a side effect enables the tools repository, that’s supposed to be deprecated (see htttps://www.percona.com/blog/important-update-streamlined-repository-management-for-improved-efficiency/)
  • Enabling a deprecated repo wouldn’t be so bad if it was actually dormant, but on Jan 13 (10 days ago) a broken version of libdbd-mysql-perl with a higher version number than any other (working) libdbd-mysql-perl version, leading to broken perl tools on all servers utilizing the ps-80 repository (actually not for trixie as packages for trixie are not available in that repo)

For Debian users this means that they have to manually disable the tools repo and/or apt mark libdbd-mysql-perl to a non-broken version and/or use pdps-80 instead of ps-80 if available for their current platform. This results in heavy cognitive workload when managing a large fleet of servers with different Debian and MySQL versions.

It would be really great, if somebody at Percona could do any/either of the following:

  • revert toolsback to a non-broken libdbd-mysql-perl version
  • prevent ps-80 from force-enabling tools
  • add a short note to the documentation explaining what the difference between ps-80 and pdps-8.0 (or ps-84-lts and pdps-84-lts - same confusion) is and which variant is recommended under which circumstances.
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(For completeness / search benefits: the broken libdb-mysql-perl(version 5.013) results in Can’t load mysql.so and undefined symbol: mysql_sqlstate error messages and seems to be the cause for at least these forum issues:

and possible more, that I didn’t find)

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and also this Jira issue: Jira

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I can’t clarify on the repo stuff, but the differences between PS and PDPS are noted in the documentation

Basically, PS is “just mysql”, and PDPS is “mysql + lots of other tools”