Colin Percival, the leader of the FreeBSD release engineering team, announced changes to the processes for forming and maintaining releases. Starting with FreeBSD 15, scheduled for late 2025, the support time for significant branches after the first release (15.0) will be reduced from 5 to 4 years. New major branches will be created every two years.
Intermediate releases (15.1, 15.2, 15.3) will be developed within a fixed release cycle, aiming to publish new versions in one branch approximately every 6 months, rather than once a year as was previously the case. With the simultaneous support of two different major branches, a new intermediate release will be published every 3 months (15.4, 16.1, 15.5, 16.2, etc.), except during the preparation of the first releases of new major branches, which will have a 6-month break between releases (for example, release 15.3 will be formed in June 2027, 16.0 in December 2027, 15.4 in March 2028, 16.1 in June 2028).
It is noted that recent optimizations in the interaction between teams responsible for release engineering and development have reduced the release preparation process to 3 beta versions and one release candidate, instead of 3-4 beta versions and 3-6 release candidates. With this organization of development, 3 months is quite sufficient for preparing an intermediate release. Shortening the release preparation cycle will allow for more timely delivery of new features to users and reduce the workload during each release preparation. The overall predictable development model will simplify planning for users transitioning to new releases, but if critical issues arise, developers reserve the right to postpone the release until fixes are ready.
New release formation and support schedule for FreeBSD:
- 13.3: Mar 2024 Dec 2024
- 14.1: Jun 2024 Mar 2025
- 13.4: Sep 2024 Jun 2025
- 14.2: Dec 2024 Sep 2025
- 13.5: Mar 2025 Apr 2026
- 14.3: Jun 2025 Jun 2026
- 15.0: Dec 2025 Sep 2026
- 14.4: Mar 2026 Dec 2026
- 15.1: Jun 2026 Mar 2027
- 14.5: Sep 2026 Jun 2027
- 15.2: Dec 2026 Sep 2027
- 14.6: Mar 2027 Nov 2028
- 15.3: Jun 2027 Jun 2028
- 16.0: Dec 2027 Sep 2028
- 15.4: Mar 2028 Dec 2028
- 16.1: Jun 2028 Mar 2029
- 15.5: Sep 2028 Jun 2029
- 16.2: Dec 2028 Sep 2029
- 15.6: Mar 2029 Dec 2029
- 16.3: Jun 2029 Jun 2030
- 17.0: Dec 2029 Sep 2030
Source: opennet.ru
