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.


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.

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.

For other RH products, there is an ongoing discussions, whether support all major releases or if to skip some.
Which implies the questions about the upgrades through versions we wouldn't pack.
However skipping several versions is IMHO quite normal for products with slow release cycle, like RHEL, so I'd expect other companies providing similar systems / products with slow release cycle to face the same problems.