The MariaDB company, which oversees the development of the MariaDB database server together with the non-profit organization of the same name, made it known recently through an announcement the significant change in schedule for the formation of MariaDB Community Server builds and their support schema.
Until now, MariaDB has been delivering a major version once a year and which in turn has the support of approximately 5 years. Now with the announced change and according to the new scheme, major versions containing functional changes They will be published quarterly and will be supported for one year only.
The official announcement refers to the "desire to accelerate the delivery of innovations to the community", which, in fact, is nothing more than marketing, as the MariaDB team has previously practiced bringing new functionality in interim releases, which is seriously in disagreement with statements of adherence to the semantic versioning rules and also more than once became the cause of regressive changes, which even led to a complete withdrawal of versions.
Today, we announced a new release model for MariaDB Community Server that increases the pace of new features that we can offer to the millions of MariaDB users around the world. We are excited to start rolling out this new model right away, starting with MariaDB Community Server 10.7, which reached RC status a month ago and includes several important new features. Community members will also get a sneak peek of MariaDB Community Server 10.8 features next week, with an RC release expected in the new year. Our hope is that the faster pace of feature delivery will allow the community to take advantage of the latest cutting-edge database trends immediately without having to wait years between a new series of releases.
Apparently, with this new release scheme, the organization intends to take advantage of this as a means to promote building the enterprise server, launched by MariaDB Corporation exclusively for its subscribers.
Besides that by changing the development cycle and reducing time Keeping the community version will make it less attractive for use in production environments, which is perceived as an attempt to attract new subscribers to the paid edition.
It is not yet clear how the new development schedule will affect Linux distributions, but as such the press release says, without specifying details, that there is a "joint work with the distributions" to provide support for a longer period and prepare a special version that better adapts to the maintenance model of each distribution.
Taking all of this into account, that even now MariaDB server shipments by leading distributions like RHEL are noticeably lagging behind current versions, it can be expected that the change in development model will only exacerbate the situation.
With the new model, we follow a strict "train-based development model" with no exceptions. The feature sets for each release series are smaller, allowing for comprehensive QA and we believe this will also increase the stability of each release series. For each series of releases, we have a deadline by which the feature must be approved by QA in order to be included in the release. If that doesn't happen, the feature will move on to the next series of releases that happens three months later. The function will have three more months to reach the required level of stability. With this, the new launch model allows us to get features at a much faster rate without having to compromise on quality. We believe this is beneficial for everyone!
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the original note In the following link.