FreeBSD 8.4 Release Process

Introduction

This is the release schedule for FreeBSD 8.4. 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	-	08 February 2013	Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule.
Announce doc/ tree slush	-	28 February 2013	Notification of the impending doc/ tree slush should be sent to doc@.
Code freeze begins	08 March 2013	08 March 2013	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	20 March 2013	22 March 2013	First beta test snapshot.
doc/ tree slush	17 March 2013	17 March 2013	Non-essential commits to the en_US.ISO8859-1/ subtree should be delayed from this point until after the doc/ tree tagging, to give translation teams time to synchronize their work.
ports/ tree freeze	30 March 2013	30 March 2013	Only security updates and critical fixes will be allowed to the tree during this freeze.
releng/8.4 branch	18 March 2013	28 March 2013	Subversion branch created, propagated to CVS; future release engineering proceeds on this branch.
RC1	30 March 2013	10 April 2013	First release candidate.
RC2	21 April 2013	22 April 2013	Second release candidate.
RC3	30 April 2013	8 May 2013	Third release candidate.
RELEASE build	02 June 2013	02 June 2013	8.4-RELEASE build.
RELEASE announcement	07 June 2013	07 June 2013	8.4-RELEASE press release.
Turn over to the secteam	-	16 June 2013	releng/8.4 branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement.

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