We normally announce releases and the end of life of releases, but today we are going to try something a little different, an announcement of “start of life”.
What does this mean?
The way we use GitHub is a little different to most projects. Instead of having a mainline and branching versions from that, MariaDB Server creates a new branch from the previous version. This is intended to happen shortly after the preview release of the previous version, but for various reasons it can come a little later. So by default, after the hypothetical version 11.7.0 is released, we will create the 11.8 branch in GitHub soon after.
The new 11.6 branch
A week ago, 11.6 was branched from 11.5. This means that all new feature development should be against 11.6 and outstanding feature pull requests can now be merged if they are considered ready by the core MariaDB Server developers and testers. This is now the default branch visible on GitHub, and it is where all new feature development should go.
If everything goes to plan, this will be a game-changing release, we intend to merge the first version of MariaDB Vector in 11.6.
Happy hacking!
For anyone who wants to make a start and give their first contribution to MariaDB, the details on how to do so are available on our “Get the code, build it, test it” page.
