Xen Project 4.7 Planning Opens

With Xen 4.6 released in October, we are already one month into the new cycle. Which means it is time to start planning for the next release. You may remember that one of the goals of the 4.6 release planning was to create smoother developer experience and to release Xen 4.6 on time. Both goals were achieved, so it was time to think where to go from here. Thus, the Xen community underwent a thorough discussion on how to manage future releases from xen-unstable and its impact on stable releases. The takeaway message of those lengthy threads is that we should continue to work on making the release cycle shorter and more predictable.
As such, the timeline for 4.7 is:

• Development starts: October 13, 2015
• Last posting date: March 18, 2016
• Hard code freeze: April 1, 2016
• Release date: June 3, 2016

After the 4.7 release, we will start to release Xen every 6 months: at the beginning of June and December. A regular 6 monthly release schedule has worked well for Ubuntu, OpenStack and many other projects. The idea behind it is a simple one: set a hard date and modify your goals to match that timeline. Which is also, why we dropped feature freeze exceptions, which create overheads and introduce unnecessary risk and debate. In addition, the new fixed release schedule will help open source projects and commercial vendors who consume Xen to plan their own releases better. And it allows us to set a schedule that ensures that every single release cycle is only affected by a single holiday period and that we have a Xen Project developer event (be it a Hackathon or Xen Project Developer Summit) during each release cycle. The stable release scheme is unchanged: 18 months full support, plus 18 months security fixes afterwards.
For more information, check out the slides that explain our release process and how it is changing for Xen 4.7 and beyond. To follow the roadmap in the coming months, be sure to check the Xen 4.7 Roadmap page on our wiki. Get involved on xen-devel@ and happy hacking!
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