Clarify 2.x Maintenance

[vorburger]

The fact that @TheKnowles as part of #710 touched upon "creating a 2.x release branch" reminded me that with #696 that topic probably is just the first but not the last time this will pop up. I probably need to be address it for the future of this project in a more general manner (and completely unrelated to MariaDB 10.6.12 upgrades or other future contributions from anyone), on the README or some such place.

Of course, anyone is #free to cherry-pick and do whatever they want on their own forks. Such is #opensource. But my position on this is that I simply do not have the time to offer "maintenance branches" of this project "for free". I intend to only maintain a main branch - as I have been, for over 10 years now! (#MuchWow.)

What I COULD possibly be interested in could be to offer maintenance for "old" release branches in a private Git repo, using some sort of "subscription" model. I just don't really know yet how I would do this in practice from an "infrastructure" point of view, particularly how to offer a "private Maven repo". Perhaps somehow tied with GitHub Sponsors? But it's probably moot anyway, unless there is real interest from end-users for this.

If anyone reading along has any ideas and input about this topic, feel free to comment here.

[TheKnowles]

As I said in the PR, I would be more than happy to run point on that maintenance branch, since I had a pressing need for it.

If anyone else needs a more modern maria with Spring 5 / Boot 2.7.x / Java 11: I have released 2.7.0 here:

https://github.com/TheKnowles/MariaDB4j/releases/tag/mariaDB4j-2.7.0

Artifact names changed, but everything else is the same for a drop in replacement.

I am looking at forward porting the 10.6.12 binaries here as soon as I have a java 17 testbed ready.

[vorburger]

I am looking at forward porting the 10.6.12 binaries here as soon as I have a java 17 testbed ready.

So this is done in #771! @TheKnowles are you intending to continue maintaining a 2.7.0 branch on your fork?

I unfortunately do not have the bandwith to offer maintenance for several branches "for free", and intend to only update and release this project from main (barring any HUGE security vulnerability, perhaps). So to anyone reading this needing maintenance on older branches, please reach out to me by email for paid support, if your company is willing to sponsor it. Thanks for understanding!

[TheKnowles]

@vorburger That is the game plan. I am in progress of fixing the winx64 package on that branch, as it has been broken in the same way as my initial commit here for 10.11.5. I do appreciate the heads up on the ossrh maven central publish as I am about to run into the same issue with a point release.