Hi, On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Honza Horak 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