Release Plan 3.6.0

Release Dates

• KIP Freeze: 26th July 23 (A KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release. Note, any KIP that may not be implemented in a week, or that might destabilize the release, should be deferred.)
• Feature Freeze: 16th Aug (major features merged & working on stabilisation, minor features have PR, release branch cut; anything not in this state will be automatically moved to the next release in JIRA)
• Code Freeze: 30th Aug 23
• At least two weeks of stabilisation will follow Code Freeze.

These dates are goals and subject to change, but we expect to stay on the Time Based Release Plan unless unexpected critical issues come up. While the earliest possible release date is 2w after code freeze, release candidates (RCs) will roll out as needed until the release vote passes.

The release manager is Satish Duggana 

How to Contribute

Before code freeze:

• Participate in votes and discussions to land or postpone the open KIPs.
• Review patches. We anticipate that this release, as it usually happens, will be bottlenecked mostly on reviews. The more reviewers, the more content we can fit in.
• Write unit/integration/system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka. 

After code freeze:

• Write more unit/integration/system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka.
• Improve documentation.
• Test the release candidates. 
• Open blocker JIRAs on critical issues found. Open non-blocker JIRAs on any other issues found.
• Fix critical bugs.
• Review bug fixes.
• Vote on release candidates. Even though only PMC votes are binding, community votes are super important as we evaluate the readiness of the release.
  • Ensure that release candidates include artifacts for the new Connect test-plugins module (see Unable to render Jira issues macro, execution error. )

Open Issues

Also feel free to refer to the 3.6.0 release page for more details of the included tickets (requires log in to the Apache Kafka Jira project).

Planned KIP Content

Note: The planned content is not binding - final content will be based the features committed by branch-cutting date. See Kafka Improvement Proposals for the full list of KIPs.

Postponed to subsequent release