This document is currently under discussion

Update of November 2022: 


Policy as adopted by the Project Management Committee (PMC) :

Release branches are created every two months at the beginning of the following month from the changes that were merged by the last day of the previous month.

If a feature is almost but not quite done at the end of the month, the release is not delayed for the feature.  That feature goes into the next release scheduled for two months later.

The name of the release is it's version.  As described in more detail in Versioning, the version number depends on whether the changes are backwards compatible or incompatible.

There is no code freeze for creating a release branch because we as committers only integrate things that pass the Code Review Guidelines.

Once a release branch is created and a release candidate is packaged, release stabilization proceeds as described in Stabilizing a release starting with a two week soak.