FreeBSD 8.3 Release Process

Introduction

This is the release schedule for FreeBSD 8.3. For more information about the release engineering process, please see the Release Engineering section of the web site.

General discussions about the pending release and known issues should be sent to the public freebsd-stable mailing list.

Schedule

Action	Expected	Actual	Description
Initial release schedule announcement	-	25 January 2012	Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule.
Code freeze begins	15 February 2012	15 February 2012	Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the stable/8 branch will require explicit approval. Certain blanket approvals will be granted for narrow areas of development, documentation improvements, etc.
BETA1	17 February 2012	20 February 2012	First beta test snapshot.
releng/8.3 branch	-	3 March 2012	Subversion branch created, propagated to CVS; future release engineering proceeds on this branch.
RC1	02 March 2012	06 March 2012	First release candidate.
RC2	16 March 2012	2 April 2012	Second release candidate.
RELEASE build	9 April 2012	9 April 2012	8.3-RELEASE build.
RELEASE announcement	-	18 April 2012	8.3-RELEASE press release.
Turn over to the secteam	-	-	releng/8.3 branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement.

Internal Status / TODO

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/8.3TODO

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