Hello,
MariaDB changed its release cycle to 1 major version / year.
However the upgrades remained supported only from one major version to the very next.
What's the definition of the term "supported" here? I've never seen such a claim elsewhere. Maybe 1 major version to next are "recommended", but even in some upgrades you can find breaking changes.
I see a raise of users (of RH products - RHEL and RHSCL mainly) that would like to jump several versions.
They had an application build on, let's say, 5.5 (RHEL7 default) and would like to get the features from 10.2 (available in RH software collections - we provide plenty of versions this way).
So far, they have to upgrade one by one 5.5->10.0->10.1->10.2; and solve the conflicts at each stage.
That's a waste of time. Such an upgrade is perfectly possible through the means of mysqldump and reload. In-place upgrades might cause some issues because of innodb version changes, but for example, from 10.0 to 10.1, they are rarely an issue because the version of InnoDB hasn't changed. The recommended upgrade path from any version is always the same e.g. dump and reload.
Lately, we discontinued support fo 10.0 in RHSCL, which means, the upgrade path metioned above won't be as easy anymore.
Also mysqldump can't be used for upgrade to 10.3, which is IMHO frequently used.
Where have you seen that claim? I've imported dumps to 10.3 without particular issues.
--
Guillaume Lefranc
Signal 18 Consulting