MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Moving to “main”

On the 3rd of July, two weeks ago, I created a poll to ask about the future of feature development branches in MariaDB Server. Specifically, whether we should switch to a rolling model which is more familiar to users of services such as GitHub.

The votes we received gave a very clear result. Today I will share the conclusions we drew, as well as setting expectations for what will happen next.

Recap: what is this “main” branch all about?

In a rolling model, there is one main branch of the tree that all the feature commits go into (typically called “main”), and this is then forked when it is time to prepare a major release.

What programming languages do your applications that communicate with MariaDB use?

MariaDB Foundation polls are an informal way to get feedback from our community. They’ve always been a bit hidden, but the most recent poll sat on the mariadb.org front page for a while, and got a healthy 5,225 votes.

It asked “What programming languages do your applications that communicate with MariaDB use?”, and here are the results:

Python 30%
PHP 30%
Java 19%
NodeJS 16%
C# 15%
C/C++ 11%
Bash/Shell/Powershell 7%
Other 7%
TypeScript 6%
Go 6%
Rust 4%
R 3%
Ruby 2%

How do we use these results?