Following on from the discussion here and a conversation on a call yesterday, I have created a poll to help decide which direction to go based on contributor feedback: https://mariadb.org/mariadb-server-github-branches-have-your-say/ I hope this helps. Kind Regards Andrew On 03/07/2024 03:46, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
Hi!
Thanks for listing the pros/cons from your point of view and it is interesting to learn that Drupal has the same model. However not all of the listed pros and cons are of equal importance.
Avoiding having MariaDB admins change the default branch every 3 months and avoiding having contributors to change the PR target branch every 3 months is a *very* important benefit that should outweigh most other arguments.
Sure, rebases might be needed occasionally even if a PR targets branch 'main' and does not need branch updates. However, simple rebases can be done by the person doing the merge using the GitHub UI. Target branch changes can't be done by anyone else than the submitter. Consider e.g. https://github.com/MariaDB/server/pull/3175. It will be rebased *and* have the target branch updated to 11.6 this week. However based on MDEV-33834 it should target 11.7, which does not exist yet, and since the submitter is about to change teams we know he will never change the target branch to a future 11.7, and thus that MR will never be merged. If MariaDB had branch 'main' as the general development target, this problem would not exist.
Drupal also uses a versioned trunk branch (11.x currently at https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal), but they change it only every 2 years, so they don't suffer from the constant need to update target branches in submissions. In MariaDB the new quarterly releases has made this aspect painful.
- Otto
PS. This phenomenon is also an example of something where the problem and the solution would be obvious to core MariaDB developers, if they just used Pull Requests themselves to have first hand experience of how it currently works (or does not work).
-- Andrew (LinuxJedi) Hutchings Chief Contributions Officer MariaDB Foundation