MariaDB Server is “main” by default

We recently had a public vote on whether “main” or a version branch should be the default. The results in favour of “main” were very clear. It has been just over a month, but behind the scenes we have been laying the groundwork for this to happen.

We think we are as ready as we can be, so with the opening of development for 11.7, we have switched to “main” as the default branch for MariaDB Server. This means that all new feature development should now target the “main” branch when contributing to MariaDB Server. Bug fixes should still target the oldest affected and supported release.

We have also updated all the documentation we could find to say that new features should go into “main”, such as this page. In addition, the pull request template in GitHub now mentions that new features should be in “main”. If you find any documentation we have missed, please let us know.

There may be teething problems whilst we get used to this new process and find any potential bugs in our tooling. But in the long run I think this is going to make things easier for external contributors.