maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Rasmus Johansson <rasmus@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Honza Horak <hhorak@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm not able to find any info about life cycle of MariaDB 5.5 or even other
> versions. Particularly if the MariaDB 5.5 life cycle will somehow follow the
> MySQL's 5.5 life cycle or if there is some another vision/rough plans when
> supporting of 5.5 will end?
>
> Cheers,
> Honza

Thanks for bringing this up! It has been on the table quite some
times, but now finally I think we got it documented. So here it is:

- - -
Maintenance policy for MariaDB releases

The MariaDB project is a community project governed by the MariaDB
Foundation. The MariaDB Foundation has an Engineering Steering
Committee (ESC), which is an elected body and represents the technical
leadership. It’s ultimately up to the ESC to accept commits against any
version of MariaDB and also correspondingly decide which versions
of MariaDB should be built and packaged.

The MariaDB project is as active as the community around it and the
MariaDB Foundation members actively working on and enhancing MariaDB.
Therefore from the MariaDB project perspective the aspiration is for each
major version of MariaDB to be maintained for five years after its initial GA
version. The guideline for supporting this policy is that bug reports not
accepted by a member within 1 month on any major release over 5 years
old will be marked "unmaintained" and closed. If bug reports are accepted,
builds will only be packaged if the ESC expressly requests this.

With this guideline in mind and the aspiration of having each major
release maintained for five years after GA all current versions of
MariaDB, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.5 and 10.0 are currently "maintained".
The following schedule shows the dates when this will change:

Major version   GA date            Five year boundary date

======================================================================
5.1                      1 Feb 2010     1 Feb 2015
5.2                    10 Nov 2010    10 Nov 2015
5.3                    29 Feb 2012     1 Mar 2017
5.5                     11 Apr 2012     11 Apr 2017
10.0                  Not shipped      5 years after GA release date

Members of the MariaDB Foundation can of course offer services to
their customers that cover the versions even longer and provide SLA
commitments. MariaDB Foundation does not provide support; if you need
it you should contact one of our members.
- - -

All feedback/comments are more than welcome.

BR,
Rasmus