is this table only used by mariabackup itself for incremental backups? Does it have any other usages, other tools that use it, perhaps?

I am not aware of any tools other than Percona XtraBackup and mariabackup that use the table.

According to the Percona XtraBackup documentation, the table is primarily intended for maintaining a history of backups for informational purposes:

Percona XtraBackup supports storing the backups history on the server. This feature was implemented in Percona XtraBackup 2.2. Storing backup history on the server was implemented to provide users with additional information about backups that are being taken. Backup history information will be stored in the PERCONA_SCHEMA.XTRABACKUP_HISTORY table.

https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/LATEST/xtrabackup_bin/backup.history.html

But it is not only to log a history, XtraBackup can also use this history to for incremental backups

okay, if there aren't any tools that would break because of this change, then yet, let's do it.
What should be the new name? mysql.mariabackup_history ?

Hello serg,

Can you please review this patch:

https://github.com/MariaDB/server/commit/24d3f2cb8037f40dfce4b6da7ca243c838aa9800

?

Thanks!

24d3f2cb8037f40dfce4b6da7ca243c838aa9800 is ok to push

The primary name is mariadb-backup, but it'd be inconvenient to have a dash in the identifier (table name), it'd always need to be quoted. So mariabackup_history or maria_backup_history. And I think between those two either is fine.

Let's go with mariadb_backup_history. It's closest possible to the program name, just using an underscore instead of a dash.