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I've been frustrated with the use of editline (libedit) instead of readline that MariaDB is now built with in Debian 11. I have found editline to be buggy: its implementation of Ctrl-R and editing of wrapped lines do not work well, plus Ctrl-W not being mapping to delete a word by default is infuriating!

As I understand it, Debian is no longer able to distribute MariaDB built against readline as the former is GPL2 and the latter GPL3, and apparently the 2 are incompatible for distribution.

For Bookworm:

# Ensure that latest source packages are pulled:
apt-get update
# Install build dependencies
apt install build-essential devscripts libreadline-dev
apt build-dep mariadb
apt build-dep readline
su <unpriv user>
# Get sources
apt source mariadb
cd mariadb-10.11.19/

Edit debian/changelog and add new line at top. Version number should be incremented by adding a letter on the end. E.g.

mariadb (1:10.11.19-0+deb12u1a) bookworm-security; urgency=medium

  * Build against readline instead of libedit

 -- Andy Beverley <andy@andybev.com>  Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:44:00 +0100

Edit debian/control and change:

libedit-dev,
libedit-dev:native,

To

libreadline-dev,
libreadline-dev:native,

Edit debian/rules and add -DNOT_FOR_DISTRIBUTION=1 below -DWITH_INNODB_SNAPPY=ON. Then run:

For Bookworm and later, edit cmake/aws_sdk.cmake and change NOT_FOR_DISTRIBUTION to NOT_FOR_DISTRIBUTION1 (this is to stop the AWS SDK from being included which causes the build to fail).

debuild -uc -us -b