I wouldn't take the documentation so personally, especially since the particular parts you quoted are just copies of the DBD::mysql documentation. I would suggest getting more familiar with the history of the need for the fork, which I can summarize as: Many people over the years report the Unicode bug, the maintainers do nothing, Pali contributes a fix to the Unicode bug, it breaks existing code and is reverted along with a large amount of other important fixes, the maintainers continue to do nothing, Pali and GoodData fork the module, the maintainers start reapplying fixes to DBD::mysql that were previously reverted. Also, the name choice is unfortunate and I disagreed with it at the time but neither DBD::mysql nor DBD::MariaDB have shown any intention of only supporting one or the other so far.