This is a specific schedule for the release of FreeBSD &local.rel;. For more general 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. MFC requests should be sent to re@FreeBSD.org.
| Action | Expected | Actual | Description | |
| Reminder announcement | 16 March 2009 | --- | +17 March 2009 | Release Engineers send announcement email to developers with a rough schedule for the FreeBSD &local.rel; release. |
| Announce the Ports Freeze | -- | -- | 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 | 23 March 2009 | --- | +23 March 2009 | After this date, all commits to RELENG_7 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 | -- | -- | Notification of the impending doc/ tree slush should be sent to doc@. | |
| Ports tree frozen | -- | -- | Only approved commits will be permitted to the ports/ tree during the freeze. | |
| doc/ tree slush | -- | -- | 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. | -- | -- | Version number bumps for doc/ subtree. RELEASE_&local.rel.tag;_0 tag for doc/. doc/ slush ends at this time. | |
| BETA1 builds | 30 March 2009 | -- | Begin BETA1 builds. | |
| RELENG_7_2 branch | 10 April 2009 | -- | The new release branch is created. Update newvers.sh and release.ent on various branches involved. | |
| RC1 builds | 13 April 2009 | -- | Begin RC1 builds. | |
| Ports tree tagged | -- | -- | RELEASE_&local.rel.tag;_0 tag for ports/. | |
| Ports tree unfrozen | -- | -- | After the ports/ tree is tagged, the ports/ tree will be re-opened for commits, but commits made after tagging will not go in &local.rel;-RELEASE. | |
| Final package build starts | -- | -- | The ports cluster and pointyhat build final packages. | |
| RC2 builds | 20 April 2009 | -- | Begin RC2 builds. | |
| RELEASE builds | 1 May 2009 | -- | Begin RELEASE builds. | |
| Announcement | 4 May 2009 | -- | Announcement sent out after a majority of the mirrors have received the bits. | |
| Turn over to the secteam | TBD | -- | RELENG_&local.rel.tag; branch is handed over to the FreeBSD Security Officer Team in one or two weeks after the announcement. |