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.
| 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. |