Is there a specific schedule for moving to the next dev cycle?

[zakkak]

Hello all,

I see that GraalVM moved to 21.3-dev yesterday (22 June).

Looking at previous changes I fail to see a pattern so I would like to ask whether there is a fixed date for "freezing" the next release branch based on some schedule. If not, how is the move to the next dev cycle planned?

version	dev-cycle start	release date	dev-cycle duration
21.3	2021/06/22	2021/10/19	~4 months
21.2	2021/04/14	2021/07/20	~3 months
21.1	2020/12/06	2021/04/20	~4.5 months
21.0	2020/10/26	2021/01/19	~3 months
20.3	2020/07/22	2020/11/17	~4 months

Thank you

[gilles-duboscq]

Hi,

The release date is "the third Tuesday of January, April, July and October".
The "freeze" (i.e., creation of the release branch stemming from master) happens on Friday 32 days before that, except for the January release where we try to anticipate the freeze by 2 weeks to account for the fact that a lot of people take vacation at the end of December.

Merging the version bump in master after that should happen at the beginning of the week that follows the freeze. As you have seen it has sometimes been delayed a lot, we're trying to do that in a more timely fashion now.

This should give us the following calendar

version	dev-cycle start	core freeze date*	general freeze date	release date
21.2	2021/03/22	2021/06/11	2021/06/18	2021/07/20
21.3	2021/06/21	2021/09/10	2021/09/17	2021/10/19
22.0	2021/09/20	2021/11/26	2021/12/03	2022/01/18
22.1	2021/12/06	2022/03/11	2022/03/18	2022/04/19
22.2	2022/03/21	2022/06/10	2022/06/17	2022/07/19
22.3	2022/06/20	2022/09/09	2022/09/16	2022/10/18
23.0	2022/09/19	2023/03/10	2023/03/17	2023/06/?
23.1	2023/03/24	2023/08/11	2023/08/18	2023/09/19

*core freeze date: During the week leading up to the general freeze, core components (Compiler, Native Image, and Truffle) should not merge new features and are effectively frozen.

[zakkak]

Thank you @gilles-duboscq that helps a lot :)

[gilles-duboscq]

One thing that might be worth noting:
During the week leading up to the freeze, we have a policy that core components (Compiler, Native Image, Truffle) should not merge new features.

[gilles-duboscq]

I have updated the answer to include the "core freeze date" and added one more row for 22.3

[zakkak]

Hi @gilles-duboscq, could you please update your answer to also mention the new (OpenJDK-like) freeze period and release dates? Thanks

[zakkak]

@gilles-duboscq this is a kind reminder