I haven’t made much progress on this (some! but not a lot), however I am in the process of setting up a new emoncms server and I am going to try Debian9 Stretch, although it’s not a Pi the process should be pretty much the same with only a couple of minor differences.
I have started a thread on migrating an existing mysql db into a freshly installed image that has mariadb installed rather than mysql, (Restoring mySQL database to mariadb) I currently believe it should just drop in as long as “mysql_upgrade” is used afterwards, I will update there with any findings on that, however…
Whilst reading up on this I found there seems to be a Debian mariadb-client package and we appear to be still using the mysql-client in this “Raspian Stretch” emoncms install guide and thought I would just make a note here for consideration.
I do not think this is a problem par se as apparently “The mysql-client package also works with MariaDB server.” plus you guys have it working and haven’t suggested there are any issues.
However. The Debian recommended route to getting the right mysql database is to install via the default-mysql-server and default-mysql-client package names and for Stretch it would default to installing mariadb-server and mariadb-client (see Chapter 2. What's new in Debian 11)
So should we be using the default-mysql-server and default-mysql-client packages and let the installer do it’s thing OR should we dictate using the mariadb-client with the mariadb-server for a fully mariadb install OR are we deliberately hanging on to the mysql-client for a good reason?
When I read this statement it suggests (but doesn’t definitively say) when a system gets upgraded to Stretch it would replace mysql-client with mariadb-client, so could we end up with some users using mysql-client and others using mariadb-client depending on whether they fresh installed or upgraded? and/or would that matter?