maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Laursen <peter_laursen@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I have a concern that I will ask you all to consider while there is
> time.  I think I understand that after MariaDB 5.1 a 5.2 release is
> planned.  I think it should not be versioned like that.  Problem is that
> there is a MySQL 5.2 tree too (it is basically an early 6.0) and it is
> still available for download from FTP-mirrors like
> ftp://mirrors.dotsrc.org/mysql/Downloads/ .
> .
> For generic and GUI clients (ie. not designed for specific server
> versions and where SQL is generated and not written by user) it is
> important that the version string can be used to identify what SQL
> statements are supported by server. The first thing such clients (like
> our own SQLyog) does after connection is to SELECT VERSION() .. and only
> after that we know if there is support for EVENTS, if IF EXISTS is
> supported for DROP TRIGGER sysntax and so on.  If there are two
> different 5.2 trees (MariaDB based on MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 5.2) it gets
> more difficult to handle.

Thanks for taking up this issue.

I agree of course with your concerns about versioning.

The problem is that numbers are linear, but source code branches/forks form a
tree.

So if we want to release a separate branch of MariaDB which has more features
than the MariaDB-5.1 branch, but less than MySQL 5.2/5.4/6.0. How will we name
that version? We were thinking to use 5.2 as that version was never properly
released. But what would be a better option?

Of course, MySQL already broke this somewhat, as 5.4 is based on 5.1 with some
patches (AFAIK), so might concievably be missing some features that are in
5.2.

And I have also understood that MySQL has now likewise abandoned the 5.4
version just like the 6.0 version.

Suggestions welcome, we will need to think carefully about this and follow
events to choose the correct path forward. Or failing that at least the one
that is the least broken.

 - Kristian.