> We are already in the territory of granting a very significant freeze > exception here. But if you are dropping a diff with "2718 files changed, > 264039 insertions(+), 84505 deletions(-)" on us, we expect that you
Diff with thousands of files is because there is a new minor upstream release 11.8.2 included. New minor upstream releases also ship to stable and oldstable and all Ubuntu releases due to the nature of the package. It is a big package yes, but if you look at the track record of these stable updates in past 10 years there have been nearly zero packaging related regressions. The package has extensive autopkgtests and probably one of the most extensive Salsa CI pipelines in Debian, see e.g. https://salsa.debian.org/mariadb-team/mariadb-server/-/pipelines/876280 Also, as you see at https://salsa.debian.org/mariadb-team/mariadb-server/-/merge_requests/?sort=updated_desc&state=merged&first_page_size=20 all changes have had at least one additional person review and approve them. Additionally, I wanted to avoid bothering the release team with two unblock requests in succession, so this includes both 1:11.8.1-5 and 1:11.8.2-1. As we are in a freeze there are more people testing and we get more bugfixes, see e.g. how https://qa.debian.org/data/bts/graphs/m/mariadb.png went down drastically. As the maintainer I have made sure all fixes and tweaks in past months have been specifically designed to be included in Trixie and are very well tested. The 1:11.8.1-5 has been in unstable since 2025-05-26 with zero bugs reported. There are some bug reports about requested future changes (e.g. "libxm 2.14.x from experimental") and some bug reports about issues that applied equally to the version in Debian a year ago, but testing has been very thorough with CI that all Debian related issues have been caught prior to uploads. I understand the Release Team wants to maximize stability by minimizing changes. For this large package I ask you to emphasize the QA work done inside the team more than the principle of freezing changes.
