I would like to apply for a micro release exception for MariaDB. MariaDB 5.5 is a binary compatible drop-in replacement of MySQL 5.5 published by the MariaDB Foundation, an organization independent of Oracle.
MySQL has been approved for MRE on 2014-02-07 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates/MicroReleaseExceptions) with the motivations listed at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2014-February/001812.html The same motivations apply for MariaDB, including: - MariaDB Foundation policy is to support each major release for five years. Version 5.5 will be supported until 2017 according to official policy (https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-maintenance-policy/) and according to upstream developers they indend to release 5.5 branch updates as long as Oracle does, and a bit after that too. - Micro releases happen from low-volume stable branches, approximately once every two months. - The MariaDB repository includes thousands of tests and there is a public continous automation system (Buildbot) which automatically runs builds and tests suites for each commit. - As part of release preparations an even more extensive test suite is run by upstream. - Tests are run on multiple architectures and distributions. When packaging is done for Debian/Ubuntu: - Every build includes running thousands of tests for the build binaries before debug symbols are stripped. - Tests are repeated for the installed binaries. - Packages pass all Debian QA infrastructure including building and test suites on multiple platforms and piuparts testing. Most importantly this MRE is needed to deliver security updates on time. The MariaDB Foundation follows a similar release policy as Oracle has for MySQL, where security releases and other bug fixes are published for the 5.5 branch as micro releases (5.5.36, 5.5.37 ...). As the packager of MariaDB in Debian and I intend to update the packages to include the micro releases as soon as upstream releases them. In the packaging process I automatically build and run build tests for both Debian and Ubuntu in parallel. This is an easy and robust way of managing packaging. It is not feasible to pick out the security fixes and do separate backports any Linux distro. For the 5.5 branch no major new features are expected. End user experience will be consistent with all micro releases. More details about MariaDB current and upcoming packaging in Debian and Ubuntu is listed at https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/MySQL/MariaDBPlan MariaDB package in Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mariadb-5.5 MariaDB testing PPA: https://launchpad.net/~mysql-ubuntu/+archive/mariadb MariaDB upstream: https://launchpad.net/maria -- Check out our blog at http://seravo.fi/blog and follow @ottokekalainen -- technical-board mailing list technical-board@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
