Colin Percival, a team leader responsible for releasing FreeBSD, announced changes to the release formation and maintenance processes. Starting with the FreeBSD 15 branch, scheduled for late 2025, the support time for major branches after the first release (15.0) will be reduced from 5 to 4 years. New major branches will be formed every two years.
Intermediate releases (15.1, 15.2, 15.3) will be developed within a fixed development cycle, allowing for new versions to be published in one branch approximately every 6 months, instead of annually as before. 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.), with a 6-month hiatus before the first releases of new major branches (for example, the 15.3 release will be formed in June 2027, 16.0 in December 2027, 15.4 in March 2028, and 16.1 in June 2028).
It is noted that recent optimizations in the interaction between teams responsible for release formation 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 such a development organization, 3 months is quite sufficient for preparing an intermediate release. The reduction of the release preparation cycle will facilitate the delivery of new features to users more promptly and alleviate the load when preparing each release. The overall predictable development model will simplify planning for users transitioning to new releases, but in case of critical issues, developers reserve the right to postpone the release until the fix is ready.
The new schedule for forming and supporting FreeBSD releases:
- 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
Forrás: opennet.ru
