Comments - Why two versions (10.0 and 10.1)?
Content reproduced on this site is the property of its respective owners,
and this content is not reviewed in advance by MariaDB. The views, information and opinions
expressed by this content do not necessarily represent those of MariaDB or any other party.
was it totally necessary to create a new version of MariaDB for these changes?
Yes. There was in underlying codebase that changes significantly and could of generated regressions for minor upgrades. This is avoided in the development process. Stable versions get bug fixes and minor features that have low risk impacts on the code base. Development versions get new major features.
is it going to be another whole new release with separate upgrade/versioning paths?
10.X are going to be new major version and version path. Upgrade documentation will be created like upgrading-from-mariadb-100-to-101. Upgrading is a relatively painless however testing is required to ensure queries are fast and you aren't using deprecated features (rare).
Surely from a development management perspective this creates resource overheads for you?
Obviously yes, but its needed to deliver stable releases and introduce new features/functionality.
Will v10.0 cease development in the near future, to be replaced by v10.1?
I suspect its got a date where development will slow on it and it would be good to know when this is and what is the official status of 5.1, 5.3 and 5.5 as no official end of life notice has been given.
I am trying to decide whether I just should upgrade our systems to v10.1.
Starting a incremental upgrade of systems to 10.1 would be recommended and deploy new systems on 10.1 to minimize migration effort in the future. Upgrades are currently only supported between 1 major version so 10.0 to 10.2 isn't guaranteed to be smooth.
http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2015/12/12/mariadb-server-gas-supported-for-5-years seems to indicate the support dates.