FreeBSD The Power to Serve

FreeBSD 12.0 Release Process

Introduction

This is the release schedule for FreeBSD 12.0. 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-current mailing list. MFC requests are no longer being accepted for releng/12.0.

Schedule

During the head freeze, the Release Engineering Team may create ALPHA snapshots to publish for testing purposes. As the frequency and total number of the ALPHA snapshots will depend on the length of time the head branch is frozen, no official schedule is provided.

Announcements regarding the availability of the ALPHA snapshots will be sent to the freebsd-current and freebsd-snapshots mailing lists.

Action

Expected

Actual

Description

Initial release schedule announcement

-

24 April 2018

Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule.

Release schedule reminder

6 July 2018

11 July 2018

Release Engineers send reminder announcement e-mail to developers with updated schedule.

Code slush begins

10 August 2018

10 August 2018

Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the head branch will not require explicit approval, however new features should be avoided.

Code freeze begins

24 August 2018

24 August 2018

Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the head branch will require explicit approval. Certain blanket approvals will be granted for narrow areas of development, documentation improvements, etc.

KBI freeze begins

7 September 2018

7 September 2018

Release Engineers announce that all further commits to the head branch will require explicit approval. Additionally, there can be no changes to the KBI until head is branched to stable/12.

stable/12 branch

19 October 2018

19 October 2018

Subversion branch created; release engineering continues on this branch.

BETA1 builds begin

19 October 2018

19 October 2018

First beta test snapshot.

head thaw

21 October 2018

20 October 2018

The code freeze on the head branch is lifted.

BETA2 builds begin

26 October 2018

26 October 2018

Second beta test snapshot.

BETA3 builds begin

2 November 2018

2 November 2018

Third beta test snapshot.

BETA4 builds begin

9 November 2018

9 November 2018

Fourth beta test snapshot.

releng/12.0 branch

16 November 2018

16 November 2018

Subversion branch created; future release engineering proceeds on this branch.

RC1 builds begin

16 November 2018

16 November 2018

First release candidate.

stable/12 thaw

18 November 2018

17 November 2018

The code freeze on the stable/12 branch is lifted.

RC2 builds begin

23 November 2018

23 November 2018

Second release candidate.

RC3 builds begin

30 November 2018

30 November 2018

Third release candidate.

RELEASE builds begin

7 December 2018

7 December 2018

12.0-RELEASE builds begin.

RELEASE announcement

11 December 2018

11 December 2018

12.0-RELEASE press release.

Turn over to the secteam

-

27 December 2018

releng/12.0 branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement.

"*" indicates "as-needed" items.

Additional Information


Last modified on: February 6, 2024 by Paul Ivanov