Analysis of MariaDB Pull Request #4262: The Quest for 10k Stars

This report details the development and discussion surrounding MDEV-38328, a proposal to integrate promotional messaging within the MariaDB ecosystem to increase its GitHub visibility.

📋 PR Overview

The primary objective of this pull request, authored by ottok, was to encourage users to "star" the MariaDB server repository on GitHub.

Attribute	Detail
PR Number	#4262
Ticket ID	MDEV-38328
Author	`ottok`
Merged By	`gkodinov`
Merge Date	January 26, 2026
Target Branch	`MariaDB:main`
Label	`External Contribution`

🛠️ Proposed Implementation

The author suggested adding a specific call-to-action in two distinct locations to maximize exposure. The goal can be expressed mathematically as: $\text{Current Stars} \rightarrow \text{Target} \ge 10,000$

1. The Client Prompt

When a user connects via the MariaDB monitor, an additional line is appended to the welcome text:

Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.

Your MariaDB connection id is 33
Server version: 12.2.0-MariaDB-1:12.2.0 mariadb.org binary distribution
Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.

Please help get to 10k stars at https://github.com/MariaDB/Server
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help.

MariaDB [(none)]

2. The Server Logs

A [Note] entry is added to the server logs: [Note] Please help get to 10k stars at https://github.com/MariaDB/server

🏗️ Technical Strategy

The implementation was designed with the following considerations:

Flexibility: The text is easily modifiable to promote different goals once the 10k threshold is met (specifically to eventually surpass MySQL in popularity).
Portability: The code was written to be easily cherry-picked into legacy releases.

🔄 Workflow Diagram

💬 Community Discourse

The proposal sparked a polarized reaction among contributors, as evidenced by the emoji reactions:

👍 1 (Support)
👎 11 (Opposition)

The Debate

The conversation centered on whether "plugging" the project within the software itself was appropriate.

ParadoxV5: ~~Plug?~~ Not to mention the potential of a “we already hit 10K Stars” bug in the future.

In response, ottok argued that such appeals are sometimes necessary for project survival and growth:

ottok: Sometimes it is welcomed, like in the case of Thunderbird getting a new life once they started appealing to their users. I think this type of request for support/visibility is a good way to appeal to users...

Despite the pushback, some users found it effective. Barmy noted that they saw the prompt upon launching the CLI and immediately went to GitHub to provide a star.

🧪 Quality Assurance & Testing

The author performed a self-check to ensure the PR met project standards:

Based against the main branch.
Conforms to CODING_STANDARDS.md.
Reviewer permitted to make trivial modifications.

Buildbot Issues

During the process, a failure occurred in buildbot/amd64-ubuntu-2204-debug-ps regarding plugins.server_audit.

Log Snippet:

-TIME,HOSTNAME,ssl_user1,localhost:PORT,ID,0,DISCONNECT,sa_db,TLS_VERSION,0
+TIME,HOSTNAME,ssl_user1,localhost:PORT,ID,0,DISCONNECT,sa_db,TLS_VERSION,0

It was determined that this was a result of MDEV-37501 and was not caused by the promotional text changes.

🌍 External Observations

Later, user notr1ch pointed out a curious occurrence in the latest LTS release, noting that a Debian package maintainer had independently added a similar patch to the Debian-specific package.

Contributor Avatars

@ottok @ParadoxV5 @Barmy @svoj @notr1ch