Hi, Vicențiu, Monty voiced his opinion too, by editing the knowledge base page here: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/downgrading-between-major-versions-of-mariadb/ It seems that he prefers the "compromise approach", downgrade is supported between versions that only differ in the third version component (patch version) as long as both are RC or GA. Opinions? On Jul 29, Sergei Golubchik wrote:
Hi, Vicențiu,
There's a compromise approach - mariadb-upgrade is required (and thus downgrade does not work) between major versions, but mariadb-upgrade is not needed (and downgrade works) between minor versions.
So, again, to summarize:
Premise: if mariadb-upgrade is required between versions X and Y, the downgrade from Y to X is impossible
* Option 1: mariadb-upgrade is never required, for any X and Y
* Option 2: mariadb-upgrade may be required for any X and Y
* Option 3: mariadb-upgrade is required when X and Y differ in the first two components and not required if they differ only in the third component
On Jul 28, Sergei Golubchik wrote:
Rather than offer a half-truth, I would us just take a clear stance. We either fully support downgrading between minor versions officially (which has implications on how we approach bug fixes, especially on the storage side), or we don't even encourage it at all, stating "at your own risk", or do a full dump and restore as the only recovery method.
Yes, this is exactly what I meant in my email too. We should make a decision and then it will determine what we'll do.
Regards, Sergei VP of MariaDB Server Engineering and security@mariadb.org