[928] in Release_7.7_team
Release schedule and feature freeze
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Apr 11 15:25:27 1997
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 15:25:23 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: saurons@MIT.EDU, source-developers@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
This is a note to let all of you interested in the Athena Unix release
know what the schedule is. It is especially relevant to those people
doing work on the Athena source tree who would like your work to get
into the 8.1 release.
The alpha test phase will begin on Tuesday, April 15. The currently
scheduled dates for beta, early, and release are:
Beta: May 6
Early: June 3
Release: July 1
However, since alpha was originally scheduled for April 8, those dates
may slip by one week as well, depending on how smoothly alpha test
goes.
The feature freeze for the 8.1 release will be at the beginning of the
beta test phase (May 6 or May 13), at which point I will create the
release branch. The release branch is owned by the release engineer,
and I will not allow new features in unless they are deemed highly
important.
After the early test phase begins (June 3 or June 10), I will become
more reluctant to commit bugfixes to the release branch unless they
are important. Think of changes beyond that point as if they were
patch releases to the current production release.
Therefore:
* If you have big changes to review, you should get them to me
or source-reviewers ASAP. It is important to test big
changes during the alpha release to limit the number of bugs
found during beta, and it takes me a substantial amount of
time to review big changes.
* If you have any new features you want in the release that
aren't "big", you should get them to source-reviewers by a
week before beta (April 29, potentially).
* If there are any bugs you know about that you want fixed in
the release, you should get the fixes into source-reviewers
by a week before early (May 26, potentially).
If you have comments or questions, please consider taking saurons out
of the cc line, since it's a relatively wide audience.
