See impetus and mailing list links (below) for more information.

Questions still to be answered?

• What is NetCAT lite?  Do we need to consider labelling in PRs for specific NetCAT sections / tribes to be consulted?
• Kafka page (below) has both feature freeze and code freeze (blockers only) dates - do we need similar?
• Would the dates above be better specified to always be on the same day - eg. as week in the year, or second Wednesday in April, etc.?
• How much of the release process can be configurable in the build?  Could we get to a point that release branches are not required, and a tag could be used - is that desirable?
• Do we allow limited bypass of feature freeze?  By mailing list vote?
• Do we need a short-lived general "next" branch or specific short-lived feature branches to merge PRs where there's a need to collaborate or bring together interdependent things after feature freeze?
•  ... ???

Impetus

In mid-2018 there was a rough consensus on moving to a fixed three-month schedule for Apache NetBeans release.  However, as of May 2019 we had not fully achieved that transition, with some aspects of feature-based releasing still in play (eg. September release earmarked as NB12 because it will contain C/C++ support, but what if that's not ready?).

This page attempts to pull together various comments made on the dev@ mailing list, along with some other projects' reasoning and methodology around time-based releasing (non-comprehensive links below!). It attempts to pull in various thoughts people have made about simplifying the release process, how NetCAT realistically fits in with this new release schedule, whether such frequent releases can be as stable, and whether all users (particularly corporate / education) want to update so frequently?

Links

https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/ff506c4a56f267a1b616c18ae218301b3e6d386ce618940e32faaea3@%3Cdev.netbeans.apache.org%3E - lazy consensus thread on adopting this schedule

https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/ea5189b51477cfca2b18e9c122872d36ab3ef6d9babf27c4aa649c3d@%3Cdev.netbeans.apache.org%3E - discussion thread on this schedule

https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/903873879219d2852e0889b14e4e8d1e4135c15bbe68f370245d10ad@%3Cnetcat.netbeans.apache.org%3E - original discussion thread on quarterly releases

https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/cc5575ac4173b8a934e78d300b1063013606be00ffc7d8d30b00419b@%3Cdev.netbeans.apache.org%3E - another original discussion thread on quarterly releases

Time Based Release Plan - Apache Kafka

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar - Firefox release schedule