## What happened
On Airflow 2.3.x, `airflow db init` and `airflow db upgrade` failed against MariaDB when upgrading from 2.2.5. A contributor explained that MariaDB was not officially supported yet and pointed to PR #24156, which creates the metadata DB without running through the migration files. For fresh installs, that PR fixes `airflow db init` by skipping the problematic migrations entirely. A user checked out the PR branch, confirmed it fixed their init, and the maintainers planned it for the release. So on MariaDB with 2.3, use a build containing PR #24156 for fresh installs.
## The fix that worked
Airflow 2.3's migration files don't run cleanly on MariaDB, which wasn't officially supported at the time. Fix for fresh installs: use an Airflow 2.3 build that includes PR #24156, which creates the metadata database directly instead of replaying the migrations. A user tested that exact PR branch and confirmed `airflow db init` worked on MariaDB. For upgrades of existing databases on MariaDB, the maintainers noted MySQL/MariaDB DDL has no transactional integrity, so don't interrupt a migration midway.