> Thinking about this some more, maybe we could attempt this, backporting > security > fixes from MariaDB 10.1 or forward-porting them from MariaDB 5.5 (still > supported until April 2020). That way we don't force any 10.0 -> 10.1 > migration > on our users (though MySQL 5.5 users will still have to migrate). This will be > more work than backporting new upstream releases, but if we limit ourselves to > security fixes and possibly some minor stability fixes, it may be feasible.
I am experimenting at https://salsa.debian.org/mariadb-team/mariadb-10.1/commits/jessie if it is feasible to get 10.1 running on Jessie at all. The good news is that it least builds without any modifications. The bad news is that mariadb-common depends on mysql-common (>= 5.6.25) to ensure /usr/share/mysql-common/configure-symlinks is available. Having and indentical mariadb-10.1 package in Jessie and Stretch would decrease the maintenance burden, but Jessie would also need an updated mysql-common package introduced..