Development/ReleaseCycle

From Sit

This is the process we go through for each release cycle.

Milestone	Description
Initial Meeting	Plan release schedule, initial features, and other pertinent information for the upcoming release. After this meeting a general call-for-features is put out.
Feature freeze	After this date no further features will be added to this release, to give ample time for QA.
Beta 1 freeze	The beta is tagged in svn to build an initial Beta release for wider testing in the community
Beta 1 info	The draft release notes are written
Beta 1 released	The Beta is either publicly or internally released. The front page is updated to reflect this.
String freeze	All strings are frozen to be allow Beta 2 to be translated
Beta 2 freeze	The beta is tagged in svn to build the second Beta release for wider testing in the community. Once the Beta is released, the snapshot is unfrozen.
Beta 2 release	The Beta is either publicly or internally released, and copies provided to translators for translation. The front page is updated to reflect this.
Final freeze	This is the due date for the final svn tagging. After this point, no updates are made to svn.
Doc/i18n deadline	Any additional changes to the documentation or translations must be submitted by this date. This date is no earlier than the snapshot freeze, so no changes will happen in svn past this date to ensure the accuracy of the docs.
Release	All news items are committed, the release materials and documentation are made visible to the public.

Legend: Italic = Optional milestones

Milestones will be shown on the project Roadmap along with target dates when we have decided them.

Idea for this table poached mostly from the Gentoo project