This is a specific schedule for the release of FreeBSD 7.3. 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 |
| Release schedule announcement | — | 23 January 2010 | Release Engineers send announcement email to freebsd-stable@ with a rough schedule for the FreeBSD 7.3 release. |
| Code freeze begins | 22 January 2010 | 23 January 2010 | 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. |
| BETA1 builds | 25 January 2010 | 27 January 2010 | Begin BETA1 builds. |
| Announce doc/ tree slush | — | 31 January 2010 | Notification of the impending doc/ tree slush should be sent to doc@. |
| doc/ tree slush | 5 February 2010 | 5 February 2010 | 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. | 10 February 2010 | 10 February 2010 | Version number bumps for doc/ subtree. RELEASE_7_3_0 tag for doc/. doc/ slush ends at this time. |
| Ports tree feature freeze | 8 February 2010 | 15 February 2010 | Only feature safe commits will be permitted to the ports/ tree during the freeze. |
| RELENG_7_3 branch | — | 10 February 2010 | The new release branch is created. Update newvers.sh and release.ent on various branches involved. |
| RC1 builds | 8 February 2010 | 10 February 2010 | Begin RC1 builds. |
| RC2 builds | 22 February 2010 | 1 March 2010 | Begin RC2 builds. |
| RELENG_7_3_0_RELEASE tagged | — | 21 March 2010 | The release tag for 7.3-RELEASE is set on RELENG_7_3 branch. |
| RELEASE builds | — | 21 March 2010 | Begin RELEASE builds. |
| Announcement | 23 March 2010 |
23 March 2010 | Announcement sent out after a majority of the mirrors have received the bits. |