FreeBSD 6.3 Release Process

Introduction

This is a specific schedule for the release of FreeBSD 6.3. For more general information about the release engineering process, please see the Release Engineering section of the web site.

General discussions about the release engineering process or quality assurance issues should be sent to the public freebsd-qa mailing list. MFC requests should be sent to re@FreeBSD.org.

Schedule

Action	Expected	Actual	Description
Reminder announcement	TBD	15 Oct 2007	Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule for the FreeBSD 6.3 release.
Announce the Ports Freeze	23 Oct 2007	23 Oct 2007	Someone from portmgr@ should email freebsd-ports@ to set a date for the week long ports freeze and tagging of the ports tree.
Code freeze begins	18 Nov 2007	18 Nov 2007	After this date, all commits to RELENG_6 must be approved by re@FreeBSD.org. Certain highly active documentation committers are exempt from this rule for routine man page / release note updates. Heads-up emails should be sent to the developers, as well as stable@ and qa@ lists.
Announce doc/ tree slush	TBD	19 Nov 2007	Notification of the impending doc/ tree slush should be sent to doc@.
Ports tree frozen	30 Oct 2007	30 Oct 2007	Only approved commits will be permitted to the ports/ tree during the freeze.
doc/ tree slush	25 Nov 2007	25 Nov 2007	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.
doc/ tree tagged.	5 Dec 2007	5 Dec 2007	Version number bumps for doc/ subtree. RELEASE_6_3_0 tag for doc/. doc/ slush ends at this time.
BETA1 builds	24 Oct 2007	1 Nov 2007	Begin BETA1 builds.
BETA2 builds	7 Nov 2007	9 Nov 2007	Begin BETA2 builds.
RELENG_6_3 branch	21 Nov 2007	25 Nov 2007	The new release branch is created. Update newvers.sh and release.ent on various branches involved.
RC1 builds	21 Nov 2007	26 Nov 2007	Begin RC1 builds.
RC2 builds	5 Dec 2007	22 Dec 2007	Begin RC2 builds.
Ports tree tagged	14 Dec 2007	11 Dec 2007	RELEASE_6_3_0 tag for ports/.
Ports tree unfrozen	14 Dec 2007	11 Dec 2007	After the ports/ tree is tagged, the ports/ tree will be re-opened for commits, but commits made after tagging will not go in 6.3-RELEASE.
Final package build starts	14 Dec 2007	12 Dec 2007	The ports cluster and pointyhat build final packages.
RELEASE builds	19 Dec 2007	15 Jan 2008	Begin RELEASE builds.
Announcement	23 Dec 2007	18 Jan 2008	Announcement sent out after a majority of the mirrors have received the bits.
Turn over to the secteam	TBD	28 Jan 2008	RELENG_6_3 branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement.

Additional Information

• FreeBSD Release Engineering website.

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