MRE request: mariadb-5.5

[Otto Kekäläinen]

I would like to apply for a micro release exception for MariaDB.

MariaDB 5.5 is a binary compatible drop-in replacement of MySQL 5.5
published by the MariaDB Foundation, an organization independent of
Oracle.

MySQL has been approved for MRE on 2014-02-07
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates/MicroReleaseExceptions)
with the motivations listed at
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2014-February/001812.html

The same motivations apply for MariaDB, including:

  - MariaDB Foundation policy is to support each major release for five years.
    Version 5.5 will be supported until 2017 according to official policy
    (https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-maintenance-policy/)
    and according to upstream developers they indend to release 5.5 branch
    updates as long as Oracle does, and a bit after that too.

  - Micro releases happen from low-volume stable branches,
    approximately once every two months.

  - The MariaDB repository includes thousands of tests and there is
    a public continous automation system (Buildbot) which automatically
    runs builds and tests suites for each commit.

  - As part of release preparations an even more extensive test suite is run
    by upstream.

  - Tests are run on multiple architectures and distributions.

When packaging is done for Debian/Ubuntu:

  - Every build includes running thousands of tests for the build binaries
    before debug symbols are stripped.

  - Tests are repeated for the installed binaries.

  - Packages pass all Debian QA infrastructure including building and
test suites
    on multiple platforms and piuparts testing.

Most importantly this MRE is needed to deliver security updates on
time. The MariaDB Foundation follows a similar release policy as
Oracle has for MySQL, where security releases and other bug fixes are
published for the 5.5 branch as micro releases (5.5.36, 5.5.37 ...).

As the packager of MariaDB in Debian and I intend to update the
packages to include the micro releases as soon as upstream releases
them. In the packaging process I automatically build and run build
tests for both Debian and Ubuntu in parallel. This is an easy and
robust way of managing packaging. It is not feasible to pick out the
security fixes and do separate backports any Linux distro.

For the 5.5 branch no major new features are expected. End user
experience will be consistent with all micro releases.

More details about MariaDB current and upcoming packaging in Debian
and Ubuntu is listed at
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/MySQL/MariaDBPlan

MariaDB package in Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mariadb-5.5
MariaDB testing PPA: https://launchpad.net/~mysql-ubuntu/+archive/mariadb
MariaDB upstream: https://launchpad.net/maria


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