PTG (virtual)¶

From October 23 to October 27 we’ll have a virtual PTG to plan the Caracal release schedule.

Caracal-1 milestone¶

November 16, 2023 is the Caracal-1 milestone. See project-specific notes for relevant deadlines.

Bobcat Cycle-Trailing Release Deadline¶

All projects following the cycle-trailing release model must release their Bobcat deliverables by 7 December, 2023.

Caracal-2 milestone¶

January 11, 2024 is the Caracal-2 milestone. See project-specific notes for relevant deadlines.

Membership Freeze¶

Projects must participate in at least two milestones in order to be considered part of the release. Projects made official after the second milestone, or which fail to produce milestone releases for at least one of the first and second milestones as well as the third milestone, are therefore not considered part of the release for the cycle. This does not apply to cycle-trailing packaging / lifecycle management projects.

Extra-ATC freeze¶

All contributions to OpenStack are valuable, but some are not expressed as Gerrit code changes. That allow teams to list active contributors to their projects and who do not have a code contribution this cycle, and therefore won’t automatically be considered an Active Technical Contributor and allowed to vote. This is done by adding extra-atcs to https://opendev.org/openstack/governance/src/branch/master/reference/projects.yaml before the Extra-ATC freeze date.

Final release for non-client libraries¶

Libraries that are not client libraries (Oslo and others) should issue their final release during this week. That allows to give time for last-minute changes before feature freeze.

Caracal-3 milestone¶

February 29, 2024 is the Caracal-3 milestone. See project-specific notes for relevant deadlines.

Feature freeze¶

The Caracal-3 milestone marks feature freeze for projects following the release:cycle-with-rc model. No featureful patch should be landed after this point. Exceptions may be granted by the project PTL.

Final release for client libraries¶

Client libraries should issue their final release during this week, to match feature freeze.

Soft StringFreeze¶

You are no longer allowed to accept proposed changes containing modifications in user-facing strings. Such changes should be rejected by the review team and postponed until the next series development opens (which should happen when RC1 is published).

Requirements freeze¶

After the Caracal-3 milestone, only critical requirements and constraints changes will be allowed. Freezing our requirements list gives packagers downstream an opportunity to catch up and prepare packages for everything necessary for distributions of the upcoming release. The requirements remain frozen until the stable branches are created, with the release candidates.

RC1 target week¶

The week of March 11, 2024 is the target date for projects following the release:cycle-with-rc model to issue their first release candidate.

Hard StringFreeze¶

This happens when the RC1 for the project is tagged. At this point, ideally no strings are changed (or added, or removed), to give translators time to finish up their efforts.

Final RCs and intermediary releases¶

The week of March 25, 2024 is the last week to issue release candidates or intermediary releases before release week. During release week, only final-release-critical releases will be accepted (at the discretion of the release team).

Caracal release¶

The Caracal coordinated release will happen on Wednesday, April 3, 2024.

Cycle Highlights¶

Cycle highlights need to be added to the release deliverables after the feature freeze to be included in any marketing release messaging. Highlights may be added after this point, but they will likely only be useful for historical purposes.

See the Project Team Guide for more details and instructions on adding these highlights.

For examples of previous release highlights: Stein Highlights, Train Highlights, Ussuri Highlights, Victoria Highlights, Wallaby Highlights, Xena Highlights, Yoga Highlights, Zed Highlights.