Hmm, then I can't help wonder if you haven't ran into a package problem. Thing is: I'm trying to reproduce to see what's going on but when I check for the existence of MariaDB ( # pkg search -x mariadb
) then I don't see 10.2 as being available.
I eventually traced this down to 10.2 being available for the amd64 branch but not fully for i386 (which is what my test box uses). Seems pkg.freebsd.org confirms this (somewhat): when I search for MariaDB I see the existence of a 10.2 client, but not the server.
Now, this is in no way enough to conclude anything, but I did notice that despite InnoDB being the default engine it's still a toggleable option in the Port configuration. Which makes me wonder if anything could have happened with the binary packages.
Sorry, but that's all I can do so far (and I know it doesn't help).