We think the intention of the old version of this block is

"if mysql is running, dump the databases".

The check has been buggy for a long long time: it reads the contents
of my.cnf ... which nowadays just has some !includedir directives.
This lead to setting

SOCKET=""

and, it turns out, [ -S "" ] returns true.

The main intention of this part of the prepare script is to backup
vaguely normal machines running a simple mysql database, such as
small group webservers. We thus don't need to consider every
eventuality.