Yes, I know that 5.1 is production. But, it would be quite easy, development wise, to build on 5.1 and have those things be available now. Over time, with bug reports, certain components would even be considered stable themselves and be added to the main 5.1 line.

The whole “development” and “GA” thing does not jive with either an open source development model with rapid feedback improving quality (hardly anyone uses 6.0 now, so what would one expect?) or with the current needs in the real world. It’s disconnected, for the benefit of conventional clarity in marketing and sales. The GA stuff is simply a distraction from what really matters.

6.0 could actually be that “enhanced 5.1″ and be in wider use, enabling it to become better quality quicker. But it’s not, and so it won’t be.

Cheers,
Arjen.

Though the reasons you state for why the diversification has occured may have been correct at one point, I think they are essentially no longer true.

Regarding patch acceptance: Google, Proven Scaling, Percona and others patches are being processed, accepted and applied to the server trees. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/replication-semisync.html as an example. There is renewed focus on incorporating these community patches quickly. If you follow the forge change history, ( http://forge.mysql.com/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&limit=500&days=30 ) you’ll see that a lot of work has gone into improving the documentation of our development process and into making this information available to the public. I feel that the MySQL Contributor License agreement which granted exclusive rights to license the contributed code was a big stumbling block to open community development, but this was remedied by switching to the Sun Contributor Agreement which grants a co-equal shared license over the code.

The revision control roadblock has been alleviated by switching from Bitkeeper to public repositories in Bazaar & Launchpad.

And “management and decision makers didn’t listen to the community” is very subjective. You can never make everyone happy all of the time. It seems we can never make any improvement to mysql server without hearing “Well jeez, why didn’t you do that 10yrs ago like did?”. It really is not constructive.

Also, The 5.1 Maria branch should not be mentioned in the “Official Products” part of this blog because it is not a “real” release. It is a feature preview several more of which you will find on http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Category:Software_Preview Albeit more publicized because Monty worked on it. These should be considered as development branches we want users to have access to binaries of for testing. It was moved to the main tree as of 6.0.6. As far as I know all the current Maria development of it is done there. 5.1-maria documentation and binaries should be removed from the dev. site in my opinion as they only add to the confusion.