The MariaDB Corporation, along with the non-profit organization of the same name, has announced a significant change to the release schedule for MariaDB Community Server and its support scheme. Previously, MariaDB released one significant branch annually and provided support for approximately five years. According to the new plan, major releases that include functional changes will be made quarterly and will only be supported for one year.
The official announcement mentions a "desire to accelerate the delivery of innovations to the community," which is essentially just marketing, as the MariaDB team has previously practiced delivering new features in interim releases. This significantly contradicted claims of adherence to semantic versioning rules and has often led to regressions, resulting in complete retractions of releases.
It seems that the new release scheme is a means to promote the Enterprise Server edition, released exclusively for subscribers by MariaDB Corporation. Changing the development cycle and reducing the support time for the Community edition will make it less attractive for use in production environments, which is seen as an attempt to draw new subscribers to the paid version.
It is currently unclear how the new development schedule will affect Linux distributions. The press release states, without specifics, that there is "joint work with distributions" to provide support for a longer duration and prepare a special version that will best suit each distribution's support model. Considering that deliveries of MariaDB by leading distributions like RHEL are already significantly behind the latest versions, it can be expected that the change in the development model will only worsen the situation. server Given that even leading distributions like RHEL are noticeably lagging behind the current versions of MariaDB, one can expect that the change in the development model will only exacerbate the situation.
Source: opennet.ru
