There is a Debian MariaDB plan from the MySQL package team. There is good news as on September 30 2013, the upload to Debian unstable is complete with MariaDB 5.5 (5.5.32). It’s now only a matter of time before this becomes available in Debian.
Its great to see the work of Otto Kekäläinen finally make it into Debian. I would say this has been in the works for seven months. Much thanks to James Page (Canonical) and Clint Byrum (HP, Debian Developer) for reviewing and uploading.
This joins the stable of packages that are already maintained by the Debian MySQL package team.