The MariaDB company, which together with the non-profit organization of the same name oversees the development of the MariaDB database server, has announced a significant change in the MariaDB Community Server build schedule and its support scheme. Until now, MariaDB has created one significant branch once a year and maintained it for about 5 years. Under the new scheme, significant releases containing functional changes will be released quarterly and supported for only a year.
The white paper talks about a "desire to speed up the release of new features to the community", which is basically nothing more than marketing, as the MariaDB team has a history of delivering new features in interim releases, which is at odds with their commitment to semantic versioning rules. , and also more than once became the cause of regressive changes, leading even to the complete recall of releases.
Apparently, the new release scheme is a means of promoting the Enterprise Server build released by MariaDB Corporation exclusively for its subscribers. Changing the development cycle and reducing the maintenance time of the Community build will make it less attractive for use in production environments, which is perceived as an attempt to attract new subscribers to the paid edition.
How the new development schedule will affect Linux distributions is still unclear. The press release states, without elaborating, that it is "working with the distributions" to provide support for a longer period and prepare a special version that will best suit each distribution's maintenance model. Considering that even now the supply of the MariaDB server, even by such leading distributions as RHEL, is noticeably behind the current versions, we can expect that a change in the development model will only aggravate the situation.
Source: opennet.ru