Installing a PHP application that requires MySQL or MariaDB, I first installed MariaDB via 'apt install' from the MariaDB repos, but there were behaviours with the installation of the application that seemed to be caused by some kind of incompatibility. Calls to the DB were timing out, and although I could see it was creating the DB, it was impossible to set the application up in its setup routine.
So I used apt remove to get rid of MariaDB. I saw the application had a *.deb installer for all requirements (wish I'd seen this sooner!) and, after removing PHP and Nginx, I attempted to install it the normal way. Unfortunately, the MySQL portion of the installation failed with:
Automatic maintenance of MySQL Server daemon disabled.
Packaging maintainer scripts detected a case that it does not know how to handle and cannot continue configuring MySQL. Automatic management of your MySQL Installation has been disabled to allow other packaging tasks to complete. For more details, see /etc/mysql/FROZEN
Unfortunately, /etc/mysql/FROZEN is a symlink to a non-existent file explaining downgrading. I can't run the uninstaller of the overall package or repair the installation with sudo --fix-broken install because the installer requires a MySQL password I can't provide it.
How can I fix my borked MySQL installation? If I could just get to a place to have MySQL run properly, understanding what left-overs perhaps from the MariaDB installation that I need to delete manually before trying to repair it, that would be helpful. FYI, the version of MariaDB was 10.3, and the version of MySQL the application package was installing was 5.7.
Any suggestions appreciated.
